6 Hammer of Thor Chronicles: Seen You Every Mirror
by La Aardvark
Summary: They came in the winter of 2517, and they took him away. They did not know it, but they took the wrong boy. They did not know that the twin brother he left behind would spend the next 41 years tracking down SPARTAN-093.
1. I Have Walked With Giants

**1: I HAVE WALKED WITH GIANTS **

**August 19, 2517**

August on the universal calendar was actually some late November-esque for Eridanus I. The world was, unlike every other Earth-colony, an almost perfect replica of the Homeworld. The ball of dirt and water and sky was all the right proportions, the right size, and even swung tipped over on the same angle. The only difference being that it somehow managed to get started turning in an orbit in the _other_ direction than Earth had. This meant that the height of summer on the calendar from back home meant the dead of winter for Eridanus I residents.

It was certainly bitter cold.

It didn't stop anyone from using the same calendar, though – the names of the months merely had different meanings. While Homeworlders would hear "August" and think, "hot", people from Eridanus I would hear "August" and think, "frozen".

Somehow, the temperature – nor even the snow heaped on the playground – would keep the children indoors, and on any given day they could all be found outside. All, it seemed, but one.

Frank James O'Neil was sitting on the tank of a toilet, his feet on the lid of the bowl, his arms wrapped around his narrow, six-year-old chest. It was the backmost stall, in the unused boy's bathroom… he'd run there after getting into a fight with three other boys in his math class, more in an attempt to keep the principal from finding him than to hide from the other boys.

His twin brother was probably elsewhere, hiding out just as much. Even their own parents got them mixed up sometimes, so it was a constant hassle making the teachers and school staff understand who was who. And sometimes, just to rumple them, they'd pretend to swap identities for a few hours.

Frank felt a little miffed that this incident would come along just a couple of months from his seventh birthday – it would be a stamp on him forevermore, he was sure, and he just knew that when his parents found out he'd been getting into fights at school again, they'd withhold whatever awesome thing they'd found to get for him.

And since his twin was _always_ involved in such altercations, there would be no identity-swapping going to save _either_ of the boys. Frank palmed his chin, that elbow resting on his knees, wondering if it had been enough time yet. He really would have rathered being on the playground, pushing the other kids around in a game of tag or hide and seek. Or, king of the hill.

King of the hill was always an easy win… some twins would be in constant conflict with one another, competing until there was nothing alike between them but their looks. But for Frank James and his younger-brother-by-fifteen-minutes, Flint Jordan, it was almost as if they truly were one person somehow inhabiting two bodies at once. They could coordinate without vocal relay as if drawing from the same mental pool of thought, and while this usually made the hill have two kings, only Flint was bothered by that – because Frank would usually ambush him with a surprise push, unseating his momentary victory.

This did not remove the fact that they were still very much two different people, however; Flint was a little more quiet, a little more observant. And sometimes, he would cut loose with sarcasm so sharp it would shock even Frank for a moment. He was a bit of a pessimist, when it was all said and done, but it never seemed to keep him from trying anyway.

Frank appreciated that last aspect… while more of an optimist himself, he too would never let anything go if he thought he could get away with trying it at least once. But the picking fights with the other boys was a hard thing to _avoid_, truth be told.

Somehow, though… Frank had a sinking feeling that this time, Flint had started it. Oh, he'd never lie to Frank about anything, but he'd drivel on and on about nonsense for practically forever if anyone else asked him something he'd prefer not to answer.

That or he'd stare at them, blankly, as if he thought they'd just spoken in tongues.

That was Flint.

Finally, bored out of his wits and willing to put in as much playtime as possible before class started again, Frank hopped down off the back of the toilet and walked the length of the bathroom, heading out. It had only been about an hour, but he still felt twisted and lonely, and he wanted to at least see what Flint was up to. The boys did not often part ways for quite this long, and for pretty good reason.

Frank made the wide hall with the sightline to the double doors that led to the playground in question when he felt a sinking feeling of dread set in… and a moment later, a brief spike of panic that he knew was not his.

With a sudden cry of protest, the six-year-old boy jumped into a run, pelting for those doors for all he was worth, striking them with his full bodyweight. His thickly insulated winter coat padded most of the impact, allowing him to shoulder through without bruising his small shoulder. Muscling through, he weathered the strong gust of frigid air before turning and taking in the playground at large; on the mounded grounds to the left were those squealing children playing tug-of-war, and the jungle gym on the right was absolutely crawling with more of the same.

But though Frank looked, he didn't see his brother among either crowd. His heart racing, his twin's panic manifesting somewhat as his own, Frank pelted first towards one, then the other crowd, before hesitating in the middle and looking lost. Where was Flint? He'd been out here just a moment before.

But nowhere did he see the coat that was gray-with-white-piping, identical to his own. Finally, upset and at a loss, Frank found a bench and sat on it, his little blonde eyebrows pinched together in worry and confusion. He felt oddly alone, something he'd never before experienced. There had always been his twin, his brother, sometimes pestering. Now he was gone, and gods only knew _why_, Frank felt he'd never feel happiness ever again.

He sat there for all of a minute before hopping back to his feet, impatient and unwilling to wait for longer than just. He went over the whole of the school grounds, even going so far as to ignore the ring of the bell that announced class restarting. Finally, when he saw one of the teachers plodding out from the buildings towards him, Frank paused and held his ground. Maybe someone else had seen Flint around.

When the adult got near enough to speak without the brisk wind cutting away his words, he stopped, and stuffed his gloved hands into his coat's pockets. "Hey, kiddo. You look a little lost. Lose something?"

"My brother is missing." Frank told him. "I can't find him anywhere."

The teacher nodded. "You're that twin, right? You're looking for your other half? Looks just like you?"

Frank nodded. "Uh-huh."

The teacher pulled out a hand and waved it at him, indicating Frank to come hither. "He's already inside… one of the fourth graders picked him up earlier, said he looked like he'd fallen off the swing or something. He's okay… dizzy."

Elated, Frank hopped forward. "I couldn't find him anywhere." He said, again, more leading the man back to the school buildings than following him there. Flinging himself off a swing did not really seem like something Flint would do, but then, accidents could happen just as easily to anyone. Maybe the cold had gotten into a chain link and it had come apart when he didn't expect it to? It explained the sense of panic, at least.

Reaching the nearest side-entrance to the school, Frank had to wait for the teacher to catch up and get inside too before proceeding; it was a fairly large sprawl of connected buildings, after all, and as a result, Flint could be holed up in any of three separate nurse's quarters. Frank did not particularly feel up to searching all three in order to find his brother. Obligingly, the teacher patted him on the head as he stepped through the doors, and turned to lead the way through the building.

"Guess you want to go and see him, huh?" The man asked, offering a half-grin. "You being twins and all."

Frank screwed his face up at the reference. "Yeah, but the whole world doesn't revolve around that one little fact." Non-twins looked out for each other, too, didn't they?

Still, in as much as no little kid particularly enjoys visits to the nurse, Frank couldn't justify the lingering sense that everything was about to change… permanently. Whatever his brother was doing, or whatever was being done to him, it seemed a bit more of a setback than merely dropping off a swing.

Frank had jumped off a moving swing before, after all… he'd bruised both knees and torn his pants up, but he hadn't even sprained an ankle or a wrist doing it. What was the big deal now? Finally, reaching the middle quarter, the teacher directing him waved a hand at the door to the room in question, allowing Frank's insatiable need to go faster to take him on inside ahead of him.

Frank didn't hesitate; he sprang forward, grabbing and twisting the knob on the door and shoving into it bodily to make it open all the faster. Being only six, it was a tactic he still used, and likely would continue to use until he got a bit more growing done. Even as much as he was not all that small for a six-year-old, Frank was still a small child, and things like doors built for use and abuse by adults were often hefty barricades for him.

Getting the door out of the way, and himself into the room, Frank paused to take in what he was seeing. Flint sat perched on the seemingly oversized examination table, looking none the worse for wear at all – his face wasn't even flushed from any recent exposure to the cold, as Frank's doubtless still was.

Frank drew up shy of the table, though, staring at the other boy with an expression on his face that even he would need a mirror to understand fully. For all that he appeared to be perfectly alright, Flint looked different to him. Something in his soft, dove-gray eyes was wrong, as he sat there looking back at Frank from his perch on the examination table.

It was almost as if he didn't know who Frank was anymore.

"He can go with you, if you'd like." The nurse said, a tall, slender woman in her early forties. She already had gray streaks in her auburn hair, but her face looked like it belonged on a much younger woman. She crossed her arms over her smock, a motion Frank understood to mean that she felt she'd just wasted her time giving a checkup to someone who didn't need it.

Frank felt she ought to do it again, though… just to be really sure. He watched as Flint pushed himself off the table, and landed lightly on his feet at its base, then as he turned and walked past. He offered Frank a tentative smile, but Frank only furrowed his brow in response.

Every fiber of his being seemed to scream out, _who are you?_, but even Frank did not quite understand why. The feeling of considerable foreboding remained. Did Flint get told something, or had he overheard something, that meant bad things? Frank made a mental note to ask his brother later for the details. It was not a good feeling at all.

The seeming utter lack of their bond was also bothersome. More puzzling was the fact that while Frank felt sure he was still getting something, he wasn't getting it from the boy he was following up the hall towards the first classroom.

He knew, without question, that something was not right.

.

**September 21, 2517**

"Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty… thirty-one." He unfolded a finger for each numeral, counting them off for future reference as he attempted to do some extraneous math in his head. Math that involved a couple of confusing numbers – because there was no way September would go through to the forty-second day. "Ten days until October."

Frank lifted his tired eyes from the digital homework sheet spread on the small table before him, and frowned at his twin. "Duh."

"And to get to the…" he closed both fists, and looked up, back at Frank. "…first of… okay, I just lost my number again." Flint dropped his hands, and blew an exasperated sigh. "But we'll be seven." He was sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor next to the table Frank sat currently at, but appeared no more inclined to do his own homework.

Frank frowned at the other boy, unwilling to admit to himself that he felt achy and sore for no reason. At the end of every stinking day he felt like he'd been running from a ravenous wolf, hefting cinderblocks too big for him to really carry in each hand the whole way. His seemingly mysterious unwillingness to get out of bed in the mornings had worried their parents, but Frank felt himself drawing away from Flint, farther and farther each day.

He did not particularly want to turn seven on the same day Flint did. He'd become _alien_.

"You'll be seven _after_ I am." Frank told him, feeling spiteful. He'd never really been short with his twin before, but then, Flint had never seemed so irrationally annoying before, either. He did feel some guilt for treating him badly, though – Flint had gotten annoying, yes, but Frank had also never been particularly amiable when he was in pain, either. So it was not all Flint's fault.

At the other end of the mainly empty living room, the door to the kitchen swung open, and their elder and only other sibling stepped through, a cup of something in one hand. Steven Agustus O'Niel was the spitting image of their grandfather – with light, tawny hair that fell straight as a whistle when it got too long, and bright, shiny green eyes set into his ivory face, he looked a little like a porcelain doll who had decided to grow up and turn into a man. He wasn't there yet, though – at three years the twin's senior, he'd already had his birthday that year and felt himself superior for it.

It was just a game, though, and a good and dandy excuse to pick on the two younger boys. Seeing them fight between themselves, however, disturbed even Steve. "Hey, guys, chill out." He issued, walking over. "Frank, quit making that face, or it'll stick to your head and you'll frown forevermore."

Frank sent a fresh frown at Steve, and bit down on the lip he wanted to poke out at him. "I don't feel any good."

"You haven't felt good for a while, FJ." Steve replied, flopping down into the chair across from Frank. He set the cup on the table, and dropped his hands into his lap. "That new movie is finally out of theaters, so maybe dad will pick up a hardcopy and we'll get to see it."

Frank folded his arms across his homework, and rested his forehead on them. "I want to dieeeeee."

"Hey." Steven scolded, reaching across the table to pop him on the back of the head. "You don't either, that's a horrible thing to say."

"He looks a little green, to me." Flint put in, suddenly. He uncrossed his legs, and folded them under him with both pointed in the same direction. "Maybe you should have mom or dad take you to the clinic and get checked."

Frank raised his head, and gave Steve a slack, defeatist look. "Why don't I? I wouldn't have to deal with any of you or this homework or my stupid body anymore."

Steve cast him a concerned look. "Your stupid body is probably just going through a growth spurt, FJ. You'll be fine." He picked up the cup again. "Suck it up."

"I've _been_ sucking it up, for several weeks!" Frank wailed, slapping a hand down on the digital sheet in front of him. For the assault, the digital sheet defaulted and the file closed on him. Seeing that, he jumped to his feet and screamed at it.

"Whoa! Hey, buddy!" Steve protested, nearly made to spit his drink all over Flint. He dropped the cup quickly on the table and stood up, coming around the table to grab Frank by the shoulders and shake him. "Hey, cut that out."

Frank sagged against his brother, something he rarely did for Steve. It made the older boy hesitate, too, but he seemed the only real family Frank had anymore. Being severed from his twin was beginning to feel a little rough. Hooking his hands around Steve's, he cast a glance at Flint, who was casting a concerned look of his own at the both of them.

"You okay, buddy?" Steve asked, unsure what to do.

"I lost all my homework." Frank admitted, weakly.

Steve heaved a sigh, and made Frank sit back down in the chair he'd abandoned a moment before. "I'll help you with it, okay, FJ? No big deal." He reached across the table for the other chair, and dragged it around, forcing Flint to duck out of the way or get run over by the passing furniture.

"Hey," he complained. "How come he gets help with his homework and I don't?"

"Shut up, Flint." Steven issued, beginning to understand a little of Frank's frustration. "You'd think you were two or something." He sat down in the newly moved chair, and tapped a finger on Frank's data pad to bring up the file again, and look at its contents.

Flint pouted at them both. "Frank just needs to see a doctor. He's gotten weird in the head." He stuck a finger up, pointing at his ear, and twirled it.

Steven raised his head, sighed at no one in particular, then cast an unappreciative look down at Flint. "Why don't you go into the kitchen and get us some crackers?"

"Do I get to have some crackers, too?" Flint countered, wary of being made to work without reward.

"Yes! Get out of here already." Steve waved at him.

When he was gone, Frank propped his elbows on the tabletop, and buried his chin in his hands, his little blonde brows met. "He changed, Steve."

The older boy looked over at him. "What? What do you mean? You changed, too."

"No, I mean… it's like he doesn't like me anymore." Frank bit his bottom lip again, before looking up and over at Steve in reply. "I just don't understand him like I used to, is all."

Steve cocked an eyebrow, but didn't get to say anything when both boys heard a spectacular crash come from the kitchen. Out of instinct, Steve was on his feet in an instant – Frank was a little slower to react. "What just happened?" Steve asked, shooting Frank a look that said he expected Frank to know.

He could only shrug.

Seeing Frank seeming unphased, Steve turned back to see the door to the kitchen, beginning to think Flint had knocked something inanimate over somehow when that thought was erased for both of them; the most agonized wail erupted through the closed door, proclaiming that the collapse – of whatever it had been – had not been purely composed of inanimate objects.

.

**September 22, 2517**

Frank James looked up when his mother walked up the hospital hall, a woman almost as hopelessly blonde as he was. The look was superficial, though – she had a degree in astrophysics and worked at a high-end corporation as a lead scientist. After the incident in the kitchen, Frank felt the whole family had moved in at the hospital… and he still wasn't sure what had happened to Flint.

"Hey." His mother issued, arriving at the row of chairs where Frank had been made to wait, and squatting down in front of him. She ran a hand over his head, tousling his hair, then flicked him on the chin. "You doing okay?"

"Me?" Frank asked, a little puzzled. "I'm… fine, I guess." He gave a shrug. "What's going on, though? What happened to Flint?"

She heaved a sigh. "The last time something like this happened, you knew more about it than the doctors did, Frank."

Frank just shook his head, kneading the palm of one hand with the thumb of his other. Today, he not only didn't recall doing strenuous calisthenics, he also didn't recall smacking the livid daylights out of the knuckles on his left hand. But while it hurt, he knew complaining would only get him more of he same – blatant dismissal. It seemed that if both twins didn't feel it, then it had to be 'made up'.

Frank didn't feel like he was making it up. He watched as his mother stalled, looking around and then tasting her lip and picking at a spot of non-dirtiness on his britches for a while before finally meeting his gaze again and getting to the point. "Frank… I know you've had a little disagreement of late, but… that's no reason to turn your back on him entirely. He is still your brother."

"But what _happened_, mom?" Frank issued, feeling snappish and impatient. "Steve wouldn't let me see and neither would dad!"

His mother gave him a strange look indeed. "He broke his leg." It was said as if she thought he ought to have already known that. "Frank… are you sure you're okay?" To emphasize the point, she palmed his forehead.

He pushed her hand down, frowning. "How in the world did he manage to do that, mom? Dad says we wouldn't be strong enough to break our own bones… not until we're Steve's age."

She sighed at him. "Well, it seems he got a foot off the chair he was standing on and then tipped it over with the rest of him still on the top… and physics works a bit better than gravity does." His mother issued, softly. "Steve told us what he was doing on the chair, so… accidents happen. But Frank… you squealed like it was _your_ fingers caught in that door last year… you don't feel _anything_?"

Frank shook his head.

"Well, you're not feverish…" She trailed off when a flash of white fabric tugged her attention to the side, the motion announcing the arrival of a member of the hospital staff.

"Miss O'Neil?" The other woman asked, casting a glance down at Frank before doing a double take, then offering him an adoring look. "Aww, he looks just like the other little guy! That is so cute." Focusing back on his mother, though, she added, "We got the fracture set and it's been pinned, so it shouldn't go anywhere."

Frank looked up to see his mother nodding. "Okay," she said.

The doctor/nurse was wearing an acrylic nametag pin on her smock, but the fabric hung outward since the front was not buttoned up, and Frank couldn't read it. Raising her compad to see what the digital readouts it held said, she added, "We gave him a mild sedative to help him sleep, so he won't be much for talking to for a while, I'm afraid…"

"No, no… wait, that's not going to work," his mother issued, firmly. "The twins are hyper-metabolic… they don't assimilate manufactured chemical chains… the sedative won't do anything to him."

This time it was the nurse/doctor who wore a puzzled expression. "Are you certain? It seemed to work during the surgery."

Frank looked up in time to share a puzzled look with his mother, but that was all before the two women departed, his mother waving a hand behind her at him to indicate he should stay. His thoughts trailed after them, though, even more mystified than before.

More and more, the word _alien_ seemed to apply.

.

**October 2, 2517**

Frank got looks when he reappeared at school after a three-day hiatus, this time alone. It was so rare to see the twins separated that people noticed when they _weren't_ together, now. He just kept his head down and tried to avoid them all, unwilling to talk to anyone about anything. If he got started talking about Flint, he knew he'd only dissolve into griping about him.

Flint was numb, insensitive, tactless… he'd gotten so bad that Frank was almost willing to start calling him stupid to his face. Still, as much as it had hurt to be rejected by his twin, he wasn't quite ready to start adding to the rift between them, himself. If there was any hope of reconciliation, though, it seemed a long ways off.

After making it home from the hospital, Flint had seemed to regress – rather than making any real effort to make sure his busted leg didn't atrophy, he instead took to sitting in the living room and poking meaninglessly at whatever homework assignment the school sent up to him. Their parents absolutely refused to force him to go through the savage throng to attend classes in person at the school, but Frank wished they might have had the brains to do the same for himself.

He felt small indeed, left to face the other second graders by himself.

Each night he made it home, hoping to reach some kind of truce, but on the days when Flint paid him any mind at all, they'd start out civil enough only to start snapping at each other and ultimately end up splitting ways bitter once again. Their parents often didn't make it home from work in time to witness any of it, but Steven did. The older boy tried valiantly to play diplomat, but he found it harder and harder to conjure any common ground for the twins at all as each day passed.

By the time Flint's leg was ready to come out of the cast – a tentative step to test the healing rate – Frank felt like asking his mother for a different birthday. Let Flint keep their old one… Frank needed some breathing room. Having to shore up in the same bedroom with him at night was making him sick.

But on the day when Flint went back to the hospital to get the cast taken off, Frank found himself sitting against the wall of the interior gym at their school, watching the third and fourth graders bouncing and swinging around on the equipment. There were a couple who looked like they wanted to make a career out of athletics on the floor, but the more Frank watched them, the more he felt he wanted to go out there and join them.

Maybe then he'd actually have a good reason for feeling like he'd worked himself into the floor every day.

Standing up at last, and figuring if he never asked, he'd never know, Frank walked the length of the gym. He paused to watch the skinny black kid who looked really tall for his age pulling himself over and around on a pair of hoops tied by chains to an overreaching bar. When the kid finally saw he was being watched, he was upside down, his feet in the air over his head. Tipping his head, the older boy cocked a lopsided smirk at Frank. "Hi, there!"

Frank offered a tentative smile in reply. "Hi."

"Need something?"

Frank pointed at him. "Can I do that?"

Before responding, the kid bent his elbows, flexed at the waist, then spun on an axis point level with his hands, and let go at just the right point so he landed upright just a couple of feet in front of Frank. There, he took the impact to the floor with just the slightest bending at the knee, and then straightened. "No, probably not."

Frank's shoulders dropped. "Why?"

The other kid laughed. "Because you have to build up to the rings, buddy, you can't just jump up there and start swinging." He waved a hand at Frank, starting to back up and turn. "C'mere."

Frank followed him across the front of the bigger pieces, trying not to get distracted by the other children fooling around on them. He was drawn over to the rack of small hand-weights, and handed the smallest set. Frank tested his grip on the first one, then lifted the other into his other hand, and flexed that, too, before looking up. "These are kinda heavy."

"They're supposed to be." The older kid told him, crossing his skinny arms. "Work with those a little bit each day, and you'll build up some muscle, and then when you're ready, you upgrade." He bent over, and picked up a bigger hand-weight, taking the small ones out of Frank's hands and handing him the bigger one. Frank took it, but his hand was dragged to his side instantly when he was surprised by how very much more it weighed than the first set.

"Wow!"

"Then you work with these for a spell." It was taken away, again, and restored to its place, and the biggest ones at the top of the rack were lifted free, and held out. "When you get to these, you can start playing around with the rings. I recommend you start with the horse, though, cos if you fall, you're less liable to twist something."

Frank looked up at the other kid, then, feeling a little awed. That biggest weight looked almost as big as Frank's head. "You must be strong!"

That earned him a grin, and his hair got tousled again. "Yeah, I'm real strong. You will be, too, you work at it."

Frank brushed the hand off his head, a little annoyed. He'd never really liked having his hair tousled for him, but it seemed like everyone did it. Looking at the weight rack, with all the color-coded hand-weights on it, he decided, "I want to." He figured the less time he spent at home with Flint, the better he'd feel emotionally. Looking back up at the other boy, he added, "I want you to teach me."

"Whoa, hey, I'm not the coach…" The other kid began, holding his hands up.

"But I don't think the coach likes me." Frank pleaded. "Please?"

The older boy looked hesitant at first, casting glances elsewhere throughout the gym for a while before deflating a little, and giving a reluctant nod. "Alright, I'll get you started… but I really shouldn't."

Frank beamed at him, and stuck his hand out the same way he'd seen his father do. "I'm Frank."

The hand was taken – and disappeared inside the bigger boy's larger hand almost entirely – and given a firm shake. "Brandon."

.

**October 3, 2517**

Brandon Robert Gordon Washington had not been born on Eridanus I. He had come with his single mother at the age of three, and while he admitted to not supposing to pursue a career in gymnastic athletics, he liked the workouts and was at the gym every single school day… and when he could get permission, he'd come back in the afternoons on weekends, too. Though gangly, and most certainly a taller kid for his age, Brandon was nothing if not graceful when he was airborne.

He made sure Frank knew what he was doing, and didn't hurt himself unnecessarily with the weights, and while Frank felt sure he couldn't possibly see anything other than dizzying blurs of colored motion while he was throwing himself around on the rings, every time he stopped to rest his arms, Brandon would pause in his twisting antics and let him know he'd been noticed.

Keep it up, keep it up, the bigger kid would say. For Frank, the weights gave merit to his soreness, and he found that if he did it just so, he could equalize the feeling with reality, and then it wouldn't be so bad.

But he couldn't stay in the gym forever, and even though he felt he'd turned a new stone, and found an out for all his frustrations, he still had to go home. Stepping through the front door, though, he found himself looking across the foyer at Steve, who looked like he'd been sitting there waiting for him ever since he'd gotten back from his own school.

"Hey, FJ." Steve greeted, standing up.

Frank offered him a puzzled look. "What's going on? Where's mom and dad?"

"Back at the hospital again." Steve answered.

"He break his other leg?" Frank asked, feeling a twinge of the old sarcasm Flint had seemed to have lost entirely. Honestly, Frank felt he wouldn't have cared much if he had.

"FJ, that's not very nice. He's practically you, for crying out loud." Steve turned him around for him, and pushed him back to the doorway. "Dad ought to be here in about twenty minutes to pick us up."

"I don't want to go to the hospital." Frank protested, walking back to the door anyway. "I only just got here." He saw Steve reach past him for the knob on the front door, grasp it and turn it, but he wished he wouldn't.

"Come on, stop whining." Steve might have gathered some small increment of pity for Frank, but he remained every bit the badgering elder brother he'd always been. He had his own quirks, his own view of things, and even though he couldn't understand why the twins were at each other's throats any more than Frank could, he still liked to think he had an even-handed approach to the keeping of the peace. Pushing Frank back down the short crete walk to the driveway, Steve added, "You can't stop being brothers just because you're not getting along. It's genetic, like balding and stuff."

"That boy is not my brother." Frank mumbled, sticking his bottom lip out.

"What?" Steve squawked, grabbing Frank by an arm and jerking him around to face him. "_What_ did you just say?"

"He's not my brother." Frank repeated, louder, his expression set and grim. "He's an _alien_."

"That is not true!" Steve smacked him with his free hand. "Say you're sorry!"

Frank just bawled and covered his head with his arms, tugging on the grip Steve still had on his arm.

Steve yanked on it a few times, shaking Frank. "Say you're sorry, Frank, or I'll hit you again!"

"Nooo!" Frank insisted, tugging back against the shaking. He picked at Steve's fingers, but wasn't strong enough to get loose. "Let go of me! I'm telling mom!"

"That what, you think Flint's an alien?" Steve demanded, cross. "He's got a broken leg, and you want to abandon him when he needs you the most! What kind of brother are you, huh? Look at you! You should be ashamed!"

Frank yanked harder. "Let go of me!"

Steve popped him again. "Say you're sorry!"

"No!"

"Say it!"

"No!"

Steve considered hitting him again, but just then, he saw their father's car appear at the end of the street, so he refrained. It wouldn't do to have to explain the situation with their father thinking Steve was the one being mean. He stood still and held on while Frank tugged and yanked, clawing at his arm in a bid for release, watching the car approach and then pull into the drive.

"Dad!" Frank wailed, jerking towards the car as the driver side door opened. "Make him let me go!"

The man sitting in the driver's seat just cast them both a strange look. "Frank, calm down. Steve?"

"Get in the car, little twit." Steve huffed, shoving Frank at the vehicle and letting him go at last. Frank rebounded off the body metal first, but he grappled with the handle as soon as he had his balance back, desperate to put the car between him and Steve. Once he was in, he slammed the door and locked it, turning to look out the window at his big brother. Steve just rolled his eyes, circling to climb in the front on the passenger side.

Once he'd buckled, their father shut his own door, and put the vehicle in reverse. "Want to tell me why you two were fighting in the front yard?"

"Steve hit me." Frank issued, quickly. "Twice!"

"Did you hit Steve back?" Came the responding query.

Flint paused, then offered a tentative, "No…?" it wasn't often their parents used philosophy to deal with altercations, after all.

"Steve?"

The older boy made a breathy growling noise, then said, "He called Flint an alien. He says he's not our brother."

Frank saw his father's eyes appear in the rearview mirror, so he ducked into the seat.

"Frank, you want to elaborate on that for me?"

"No." Frank mumbled. "I don't want to go to the hospital anymore."

"Frank, have you ever seen a real alien?" Their father asked.

"No." Frank mumbled again.

"Then what makes you think your twin brother is an alien? Does he have three eyes? Green skin? Tentacles?"

"No…" Frank began, feeling like he'd been cornered and his argument dismissed yet again. Crossing his arms, he looked pointedly out the window, wishing his father would just drop it.

"Well, then, what makes you think he's an alien? Why did you call him that?"

"Because." Frank mumbled, quieter than his previous answers.

"What's that?"

"I don't want…" Frank heaved a loud sigh. "You wouldn't believe me. But he's not my brother. He can be Steve's brother, but he's not mine."

His father was quiet for a while, seeming to consider what reply he could give to that. Steve didn't say anything, for which Frank felt grateful. But despite his couple of hours at the gym being meager at best, he still felt like someone had borrowed his legs for some hard running before giving them back to him. It was as if he'd been training for the UNSC like a soldier.

But the UNSC didn't take six-year-old kids to be Marines. A boy had to be sixteen with parental permission, or eighteen without it, or the military simply wouldn't take them. And last he recalled, Frank James had not gone to the recruiter's office, nor signed anything other than his homework.

And it had been pulled hen's teeth for his teacher to get him to do that much. Frank sat in silence and brooded the whole way to the hospital, watching the city go by without really seeing it. He still couldn't figure out what had made his twin change like he had… and a plethora of changes it had been! He'd gone from plucky and sarcastic to moody and bitchy, and it seemed his previously unsurpassable ability to balance anything on anything else – including himself on a chair – had evaporated the same way his immune system had.

The condition was rare as hellfire and had shown in their father under much, much milder terms, but neither twin had _ever_ been susceptible to drugs before. They never got infections or colds or allergies, never seemed to come down with the flu, and though the school made sure they got their booster shots every year, those didn't seem to do anything to or for them either.

That nurse/doctor-person had claimed to have successfully put Flint down under _mild_ sedatives. Frank felt he had compelling evidence enough; six he may be, yes, but he was not an idiot. That boy was just all _wrong_.

He was not the twin brother Frank had known.

At the hospital, Frank walked in with the other two more because he didn't want to get stuck in the car in the frigid parking lot, but he didn't tag along very closely, and his father had to correct him twice in lagging behind too far. Inside the building proper, though, he stayed closer for fear of getting swept away by all the other people in there.

At the other end of an elevator ride, the trio made their way through more winding hallways up until Frank felt he'd never get un-lost inside the place without help. They arrived finally at door with numerals stenciled onto it, and as the other two ventured through, Frank leaned on the doorframe and peered in from there.

The room looked overstuffed with furnishings, most of it hospital equipment, but it was a small room to begin with. He could see Flint from where he stood, but he looked fine to Frank – why had they all gone back to the hospital? Listening to his parents exchange information helped to clarify, somewhat, though… for some reason, the pins put into the broken bone had come loose, and the staff were preparing a ward to do investigative surgery to figure out why.

When he saw his mother flip back the thin sheet Flint was sitting under, Frank stretched up on his toes to see what the leg looked like. When he saw it finally, he grimaced and looked away – the skin just below that knee had turned a grisly looking violet color, with a sharp green outline. He heard his mother say more, but it wasn't in English anymore. Figuring it was more than likely a string of medical terms rather than an actual other language – he knew his mother only spoke one known dialect – Frank turned to look back out of the room. It was preferable to watch people go by in the hall than to see that ugly looking bruise.

He finally felt a pang of sympathy, but it wasn't the same as he might have felt before the bond had seemed to dissolve. As his eyes took in the passers-by in the hall, he felt his skin crawl across his knuckles, prompting him to curl his hands into fists. If Flint had started to punch the living daylights out of his mother, doubtless he'd have heard some kind of commotion – at least the smacking of impact! – before now. But the room remained quiet and still behind him, with no one moving much at all.

That did not change the fact that he felt like he was hitting something rather brutally, all without raising his hands in the least.

Tucking his chin to his chest, Frank folded his arms around one another, and closed his eyes. _You're still out there, Flint._ Wasn't that obvious? Making anyone else see this self-evident truth was more effort than it was worth, ultimately. _That boy is not you… but I'm the only one who seems to see that._ What had happened to cause this strange set of events was puzzling by far more so than any other strange circumstance to ever be presented to him – he wasn't all that fond of puzzles, either. But like Flint, he could think along a sequence of events to stay six or ten steps ahead of anyone else on the same thought train.

Raising his head again, Frank let his eyes trail after an elderly man being pushed in a wheelchair up the hall. Silently, his face smooth of expression, Frank conjured a life-plan he knew he'd pursue until his end if he never found his end goal.

I'll find you again, and I'll show them. I'll show them that that boy isn't you, and I'll make them see that I was right.

When the doctors arrived, his parents stepped back to let them take Flint away, but though Frank watched them go, and he knew Flint was looking back at him the whole way down the hallway, he felt less and less attached to the boy leaving him behind.

Still, just in case, Frank raised a hand, and waved once in farewell.

From between the nurses, Flint lifted a hand and waved back.

"I have a bad feeling about this." He heard Steve say. "There's more to those loose pins than they're telling us."

"I'm sure we'll be told everything once they're sure what they're looking at, Steve." Their father assured him, patting the elder boy on both shoulders at once.

Frank cast a deadpan, knowing look back at Steve, though, telling him that he agreed with Steven's thoughts. The family gathered in a waiting room down the hall to wait, the TV in the corner of the ceiling blaring but uninteresting to anyone. It varied between commercial advertisements of products the family had never had a use for and the streaming news of the raging insurrectionist factions that the UNSC kept calling the bad guys.

Eventually, having leafed through all the uninteresting magazines on the little coffee table at the end of the room, Frank wound up watching it for a while anyway. He watched as the camera was zoomed in on a smoking, shelled-out building in the middle of a business district on another world. The report was some forty hours old, but the broadcast hubs couldn't get it to Eridanus I from another world any faster than that, so it was re-broadcast as breaking news yet again, despite its age. Frank knew that – his father had explained it to him once already. Still, it more often than not was news the residents of Eridanus I had not yet heard, so nobody complained about the technically mislabeled newsreels.

"Hey, don't watch that." Steve said, elbowing him. "That's garbage."

"I don't have anything else to do." Frank replied, hugging his arms to his sides. "And if it wasn't approved for all audiences, they'd have said something about it by now."

"You sure about that?" Steve asked.

"What's to see?" Frank argued, waving a hand at the screen. "It's just pictures of smoke coming out of a building that looks like it's missing all its insides."

Steve focused on the broadcast, then, himself. "The Innies bombed it." He said, eventually. "Says they killed a bunch of people."

"That's what the newsies always say. Innies kill people. I don't know, I never met nobody who was claiming to have been killed by an Innie." Frank mused.

Steve giggled at him for the comment, but didn't try to correct him – Frank wasn't stupid, but he'd been shielded like all kids his age from certain facts of life. If Frank ever did meet anyone killed by an insurrectionist, the odds of said person _telling_ Frank as much were nonexistent.

"Why are you laughing?" Frank asked, turning his head to look up at his brother. "What's funny? Innies killing people isn't funny, it's bad. The newsies say so. Upsets whole cities when Innies kill some people."

Steve just squashed his grin and shook his head. "Never mind… had an extraneous thought. Not related."

Frank cocked a blonde eyebrow. "About what?"

Again, Steve just shook his head, refusing to answer. He was not about to pitch headlong into the complicated subject of explaining death to his little brother with the other one seeming to be taking a stab at testing his luck in that department. The wait proved a long, boring one, so much so that by the time it was overwith, Frank and Steve both wanted to just run out of the room and make a game of knocking over nurses on their way past them all. It seemed the only thing imaginable that could be done, even as much as it would only get them both in big, big trouble.

Both somehow restrained themselves, though, standing up to follow their parents out into the hall after the doctor come to get them.

Frank tugged on Steve to make him move, having gotten left in the back. He did not feel willing to be left out of the loop – despite the atrocious noise level in the hospital, everyone seemed so horribly soft-spoken, making hearing what they were saying from anywhere other than an inch in front of them an impossibility. And Frank wanted to hear.

Steve tucked him in front of him, retaking his former position once he had his brother in front of him, and looked back up at the doctor. Frank read off his acrylic nametag, and wondered how to pronounce the name the man had – it had way, way too many consonants in it.

The man had both his parent's full attention, though, explaining in that too-soft-to-be-heard tone of voice. Frank strained to hear, but he only caught bits of it.

"… doesn't look good for the bone itself. There's no sepsis in the tissues around the injury, so we don't know why or how. But it isn't responding to anything under culture… it's as if his cells are turning on one another. Anything we have to stop the spread will only kill more live tissues, including the muscle in the leg." He looked sympathetically at the couple for a moment, then added, "We can amputate, and hope to stop the spread that way… but we'll need to get on it right away."

Frank took one of the hands Steve had dropped on his shoulders, and tugged on it. Once he had his brother's attention, he asked, "What's he mean, Steve?"

"Flint's gonna get shorter." Steve answered, looking worried. "That's all."

The doctor cast the boys a glance, but little more. Returning his eyes to their father, he said, "I know it's not an easy decision, but if we don't find some way to cut off access to the rest of his body, this could easily spread and kill him. I want permission to take the leg off. I'd like to do it today."

"You're gonna chop his legs off?" Frank squeaked, in protest. "You can't do that! How's he gonna walk?"

Steve gave him a light shake. "Hush, FJ… it'll be okay."

Frank quieted, but he affixed the doctor with an unhappy glare, certain that this was going a bit far. He wasn't _that_ displeased with the strange alien pretending to be Flint, after all! Certainly identity theft wasn't _that_ terrible a crime… was it? He spent the remainder of the day wondering if the judicial system actually chopped limbs off of people who were charged with that crime, but he never got the chance to look it up on the extranet.

.

**October 4, 2517**

The next time Frank got to see his twin – or the boy pretending to be his twin, who had somehow fooled everyone except Frank – he looked exactly like what Steve had said he would – shorter. Given a wheelchair to assist mobility until he was ready to be fitted with a prosthetic, Flint now spent even more time refusing to move. He also looked permanently pained and there had to be someone always after him about picking at the bandaging over the stump. The one time he was left alone for too long, he nearly got it all peeled off before he was stopped.

Feeling bad about the way he'd treated Flint, Frank tried to approach him that afternoon. "Does it hurt?" he asked, tentative of a snappish comeback.

"It itches." Flint answered, grimacing. "I want to scratch until there's nothing left, but it never stops itching."

Frank gave a small nod, and let his eyes drop to the bandaged stump where the other boy's leg just _stopped_. It looked wrong… incomplete. Which was, he supposed, half the point. One did not have a stump if one had not lost a bit of themselves, after all.

"You look different, Frank." Flint mentioned, tipping his head to one side in regard to what he was looking at. "Did dad make you take track or something?"

Frank offered a sad smile. "No… and it's not track. There's a fourth grader in the gym who is teaching me how to use the weights. It's kinda fun… maybe when you get better enough to go back to school, we can do it together." Frank offered. "And you can meet him."

"What's his name?" Flint asked.

"Brandon." Frank stepped over to the chair tucked under the table where he usually did his homework, and pulled it out before plopping down in it. "He's really tall." He gestured with his arms in the air, the wild waving making Flint grin slightly. "And strong!"

"What's he do in the gym when you're not there?" Flint asked.

"I don't know, I'm not there." Frank answered, grinning back. For once, Flint wasn't trying to claw the muscle off his stump. If Frank could keep him distracted for long enough, then it might actually get to heal, and then he'd get the prosthetic and they'd all be back to normal in no time at all. And maybe Frank would stop feeling as if Flint was jumping up and doing calisthenics when nobody was looking, and they could be normal again, too.

"Are you gonna be a big muscle-man like the guys on the broadcast?" Flint asked, teasing. "You won't be able to fit through the door!"

"I'm not gonna get that big!" Frank complained, but he was still grinning. "I'm only six!" He jumped up and pretended to do a muscle-advertising arm-curl. "I can only get _this_ wide right now." Never mind he was wearing a shirt too loose to show what little muscle he did have at the moment.

Flint laughed.

.

**October 19, 2517**

Frank tried getting up onto the top of the horse. He tried hitting the punching bag. Both were too high for him to do much with. He did a lap around the track just to see what that was like, then came into the gym and pumped some iron for a little while, watching as the coach directed the fourth graders on the rings and bars. Watching them fling themselves around like they were was fascinating, but Frank felt sure he'd come flying off of those handholds in a heartbeat if it was him up there, spinning in mid-air like the other kids were doing.

But on the morning of the 19th, feeling he'd given his soreness a backseat at last, he threw back the covers on his bed and jumped to his feet only to recoil back onto the bed at what he saw across from him.

Flint was lying on his own bed, still under the blankets, staring forlornly at his hands… both of which were swollen up like water balloons. He didn't look up, not even when Frank tore out of their bedroom screaming at the top of his lungs for their parents. Steven arrived first, being closer than either parent, the look on his face suggesting he expected to find a bloodstain or worse.

Flint was taken back to the hospital, but though Frank didn't go, he wondered if he ought to have. It was obvious to him now that there was something much more wrong with the alien pretending to be his twin than merely a lack of proper identity… or balance issues. At the end of the school day, and after his usual brooding time spent talking with Brandon and moving weights, Frank went up to the hospital again to see Flint.

The swelling was down, but the prognosis overall did not look as promising. He stood there next to Steven as their father explained what 'acute idiopathic osteo-necrosis' meant, and why the medical wonders of the age could do nothing about it. The sudden onset of decay in the structural cells of Flint's bones was unexplainable, as there seemed no traceable path back to any given source for the affliction. But as the days went by, the condition would only worsen more than it already had, as the bones grew first soft, and then decayed into a soft slush of septic pus that then began to eat away the muscle tissues surrounding each affected area.

It seemed that removing the broken leg had not stopped, nor even stalled, the infection found at the break. Everything conceivable had been thought up and tried, but ultimately none of it seemed to do any good. Without a cause for the decay, there was no way to stop it, and certainly no way to stop the spread as the dead parts ate into the living.

When he was tested for similar, Frank turned up entirely healthy, however, leaving even more questions – why one of a pair of identical twins, and not the other? What had one done so very wrong that the other had failed to do?

Frank had a feeling it had something to do with having gone missing that day back in August at the school lunch break, but he kept his mouth shut. Nobody believed that Flint was not the same boy, so there was no reason to think they would believe him on anything else he'd speculated about. He'd even gone through a fairly normal phase of trying to convince everyone _he_ was Frank… something the twins had done a lot.

The bloodwork looked the same, after all, and so did the exterior. Flint looked just like Flint always had. Just like Frank. But that was all superficial and irrelevant to Frank.

Still… acute idiopathic osteo-necrosis was going overboard, as far as getting smacked for being someone that one isn't. Frank wondered where his real twin had disappeared to, and why he'd gone away at all, and where this other, strange, diseased boy had come from. Steve took it all to heart, though – he, like their parents, believed Flint was the same boy he'd always been. While Frank felt bad for the poor soul suffering through the condition, he did not feel nearly as stricken as the other members of his family.

This, too, made them even more angry with him. First he denied the boy they thought was his twin the courtesy of 'feeling it' with him, and now he denied him the sympathy a brother deserved.

Frank had quit trying to convince them of what he knew to be the truth.

After all… who would believe that a six-year-old knew more about any given situation than his parents did? Frank sat through the whole process of hospital visitations, of long discussions of hopeless scenario after hopeless scenario between the doctors and his parents, using his own spare time to pull weights and run some laps. It took several more weeks to come to a head fully, until finally, when the necrosis attacked Flint's spine and skull, and the sepsis got into his internal organs and shut them down, it was over.

Frank felt certain he'd never seen his father cry before… nor seen his mother so very sad. Steve looked broken, but he remained silent about it, through the preparations and then the funeral and even much of the aftermath.

In the end, all Frank felt was a loss of companionship – towards the critical end, he had managed to make friends with the alien, but it was to no avail. He'd died, rather horribly in fact, and Frank got their bedroom to himself for the first time in his life. Despite how he had always known that that strange boy had not been his twin, it still looked like a hollow, empty room when he saw it first.

Flint was, truly and wholly, gone.


	2. Building A Mystery

**2: BUILDING A MYSTERY**

**March 28, 2525**

Brandon and Steve were both finishing up their final high school year, readying to graduate and look into a college for a degree in something interesting. Frank, having the great and wondrous fortune to be toodling along in their shadow, never needed to go out of his way to express much of anything.

Poor Brandon had had a hard time coming of age, but though his voice constantly broke back and forth during the transition, one of the few people he would still talk to despite it was Frank. He rather envied the younger boy, though, when despite Steve enduring much the same humiliation, Frank's voice never broke at all… it just gradually, almost imperceptibly, deepened a little bit at a time.

For it, there were some small communication gaps between them – Frank never understood the strange silences the two older boys often adopted, as he personally had never changed his vocal habits to cover for what he might have perceived to be a personal flaw for a while. It was something Brandon especially liked to poke at him for… Frank had missed something special, he'd say.

But at fourteen, there really wasn't a whole lot going to get in the way of a boy like Frank. He still felt those same, odd, slightly removed tendencies that he knew came from his twin… he tried hard not to mention them to anyone, but he still caught himself peering around corners looking for the missing other. Wherever Flint – the real Flint – had gone, he was taking his time being there, and hadn't come home yet.

Everyone else thought he'd died at age six, though… so it just wouldn't do to bring up that kind of memory. In the meantime, Frank worked the gym until he looked a little like Brandon did – all sinew and muscle. But Frank had some aspects Brandon had failed to achieve, at a much younger age. While Brandon was busily filling out at seventeen, Frank had started that process already, and he looked like a bigger kid than he really was because of it.

Their father assured them that boys did not stop growing until they were twenty-one… but already, Steve was six foot two and Frank was five foot eleven. Brandon stood six foot one, making them the three tallest kids in the school.

Frank imagined he might get as tall as Steve someday… but he knew he'd spend the final few years of school in their hometown alone, when the elder two graduated and moved out to look for a college campus to live on for a while. It was a rather disheartening thought, in all truth… Frank had discovered he didn't really make friends easy. That, or people willing to be friendly were just that rare. The few times he thought he'd made it with a kid his age, he'd get a splash of reality a few months later when said 'friend' wanted nothing more to do with him.

So he stuck with Brandon, even though he knew the lanky black kid wouldn't be around for much longer.

Frank found himself weathering down some of the strangest senses of irritation and prickles that he'd ever known, and more often than not he would wake up in the middle of the night certain he'd been disturbed by something. Something he quickly discovered wasn't external. On the nights he chose to stay up and study – more to test the prickles than to improve his grades any – he'd find himself twitchy and hot, and on some of the rarer occasions, even pondering the reasons why it felt like someone was carving his skin open with a blunt butcher's cleaver.

It was not, he soon discovered, all there was to the story of his missing half.

.

**March 9, 2525**

Arriving at school feeling groggy and trying not to grimace for the weird, twisting pain in his shoulders and elbows, Frank carried his study material through the doors and headed up the hall through the throng of other kids his age, heading for the first class.

Brandon found him first, a dot of stark brown in the middle of a sea of white kids, and shuttled him to the side where an empty corner existed. "Hey, got something to tell you!" He sounded excited, as if whatever it was, it was a good thing.

Frank squinted at him, feeling every inch of his skin rise in acidic temperature, then try to flay from his person. Physically no such thing was happening… but it made it hard to concentrate on what Brandon might have to say.

He noticed, though, and hesitated. "Hey… you okay, FJ? You don't look so good…"

Frank stuck his tongue out. "Feel like I'm being boiled alive." Even though he had not been doing any screaming – though he certainly wanted to – he still sounded hoarse.

Brandon gave him a concerned look. "Ooh, don't tell me you're getting a late onset of that same crap that wiped your brother out…"

Panic shot through him at the mention, but just when he thought he might have finally felt something negative of his own for the first time in the eight years since the alien's death, he felt the same echo back at him from that distant, mysterious empty space where the twin was supposed to be. Flint had felt that… and had just lost it, too.

"Hey!" Brandon called, catching him by a shoulder and shaking him lightly. "Easy, there… maybe you should sit down…"

Frank didn't want to sit down, though – he would have rathered dying instead. Hot, searing fire lanced through every muscle cluster he owned, gathering at first in several central points before then beginning to spread out from there and cover all the rest of him. Indeed, it did feel as though his bones might be being incinerated out from within his muscles. He could feel Brandon clawing at him as he sank to his knees on the floor, but though he knew he was gasping for breath, he also didn't feel like the air was doing him any good.

Slowly, the pain blurred out the vision of the hallway, and even when he blinked the moisture out of his eyes, he still couldn't see at all. Blindly he groped in reply for Brandon's arms, but he wasn't sure if his arms were moving at all. He certainly couldn't feel enough to tell if he ever made contact with anything.

If he had fallen into a pit of frothing lava right then, he knew he would not have noticed. Frank gasped and wheezed, more choking on each breath than assimilating the air they contained, until he finally, blessedly, passed out from the pain.

.

**March 11, 2525**

The world snapped back to, as if a shallow rendering of its former self, before he had the mental processes in order enough to get his eyelids up. Groggily, and still in a considerable amount of pain, Frank tentatively lifted one, to peer out and see if there truly was fire and brimstone out there. A soft _beep_ to his right startled him nearly clean out of his skin, but all he could do was flinch in reply to that.

"Hey, it's alive." The voice of his brother, Steve, greeted. "What happened, man? Brandon said you just dropped like a rock in the middle of the hall at school."

Frank just groaned.

Slowly, as if hesitant to appear, Steve came into focus through the bleary vision of the world. "Doctors say there's nothing wrong with you… you're clean as a whistle."

"I don't feel clean as no whistle." Frank grumbled, testing the use of an arm and ultimately deciding against moving it. Everything still burned, but rather than a searing boil in a strong acid, it had reduced more to a livid simmer.

Steve cocked his head at the answer. "What happened, FJ?"

Frank offered his best confused expression – even that hurt like hell. "Beats the hell out of me, Steve… wish whatever it was _hadn't_ happened, though…"

"Frank, it's been… two days." Steve informed him, crossing his arms. "You've been under for most of that time. And according to that brain-thingy they have, your nervous system is firing like a goddamn minigun."

Frank clenched his jaw and grimaced at Steve. "I _know_ that much!"

"What did you eat?" Steve asked, sounding puzzled.

"Breakfast?" Frank offered, trying and failing to straighten his expression out for once. Keeping his features twisted for the pain the rest of him was feeling was making the pain in his face a little worse. "Same as every other day."

"So this was… sudden?"

Frank tried to focus on his brother's face again, noting the hint of trepidation in that last query. "I've got no plans to die horribly, Steve."

"You'd better not, FJ." Came the soft reply. "I don't want to watch you decay, too."

Frank let his head rest back on the pillow, his eyes closed. It was a little better that way… but he could tell Flint was moving… and by the way it hurt, it felt like he was trying like a blithering idiot to get up. "Sit still, sit still…" Frank muttered under his breath, wishing his link was good enough to send messages through.

Flint didn't listen, if he could even hear.

"Who are you talking to?" Steve asked, curiously.

Frank opened his eyes, and gave the patterned hospital-room ceiling a pained wince. "Never mind me, Steve… I think I'll be okay." If Flint moving around made it hurt worse, that likely meant that the source of the pain was at Flint's end… which also meant that Frank was just what the doctors said he was – fine.

"I'm not going to never mind you while you're behaving like someone with a strange, incurable, undetectable disease, Frank." Steve countered, sounding hurt and stern at once.

Frank cast him a sympathetic look. "I'll be okay, Steve… really. Just… gimme a little while." The pain in the soles of his bare feet flared into barely-tolerable agony, but just when Frank was about to think that Flint was actually going to go somewhere, instead he got the distinct feeling that he didn't go anywhere much at all but down.

Impact sent him over the edge, curled upwards, unable to choke back the scream.

Steve jumped to his feet in a flash, catching him and holding him away from a plummet of his own with similar ends, yelling over the scream for something Frank could not define. When it ebbed, he relaxed against the bed, only then realizing he'd sunk his fingers into his brother's arms, and clutched so hard that he'd drawn blood. Heaving for breath, he managed to make himself let go, but he still saw Steve's grimace as the hospital staff sent to check out what was going on came charging in.

For once, Frank rather vehemently wished he _could_ assimilate modern drugs… he wanted to drown himself in anesthetics until there was nothing left but the painkillers themselves, and all that remained of Frank was a whisper of lingering thought.

That, or Flint needed to be considerate enough to not get boiled alive.

.

**March 12, 2525**

Each day following the boiling session, Frank would wake up feeling his face crusty and tacky, and he often left strange brown stains on his pillow from where it came off his cheeks. If Flint was experiencing the same thing, Frank didn't know, but he had a feeling that the enormous nervous stress had garnered himself a similar physical reaction; his eyes were bleeding.

They ached, and while it was hard to focus, he often found he could see things that had previously been masked – by humidity, by distance, by low or poor lighting. It was as if his bond with his twin had given him a recessed, slightly warped throwback of whatever Flint was going through.

Drawing conclusions for what in the world it had been this time, though, proved hard to manage. He often found himself shaking uncontrollably, and when he didn't have ridiculously excellent vision, he usually was damn near blind. Navigating the school and the grounds – and even his parent's house – was difficult on those days. Forcing himself to get up and move, to walk from one end of the room to the other at all, really, was a chore just in and of itself.

Wherever Flint was hiding, though, he was doing the same thing. All marks of strain were removed for the most part, but he was ambling about in pretty much the same casual manner Frank was. It was a mild comfort, to know he wouldn't be doubled up in the middle of class because of something Flint had done.

But above all else, Frank hoped the blood seeping out from around his eyes would go away soon… if anyone at all ever found out about it, he knew he'd be back in that hospital so fast he'd never see the light of day ever again. Osteo-necrosis or not, this was certainly acute and idiopathic!

.

**March 30, 2525**

The pain of being boiled half to death was now mainly gone. He almost never took to shaking anymore, and his eyes hadn't bled in a couple of days. But Frank felt he'd never been so morose in his whole life. Everything around him looked cheery and alive, and there seemed no reason whatsoever to be so sad. But all he felt was the most profound sense of loss, of failure, that could possibly have crossed his path.

He felt _sad_. Every fiber of his being seemed committed to this expression, but staying home from school for what was basically a bad mood would be impossible. Frank wasn't shutting it out, though – even though he knew that from all the indicators, the overwhelming sense was not his own.

He could feel Flint again.

Despite the fact that everyone around him remained dedicated to the idea that his twin was dead and gone, Frank remained steadfast in the belief that he was not, in fact, any such thing. Having to endure all the terrible bouts of physical abuse from the other end of what was clearly the exact same bond was proof enough.

Time and distance could never separate them far enough, Frank was sure… because the last time he checked, there were no listings of anyone that looked like himself other than his own self on Eridanus I. That meant that wherever Flint had gone to, he was off-world.

Far, far away.

In as much as what Frank had ever gotten from his twin had been the extremes of anything, he still found himself focusing all his mental processes on the signals… be they negative, painful, or even temporarily crippling. All of it was just one more whisper of hints lending to the strange mystery that had befallen his real brother. While distressing that he'd been kidnapped at the tender age of six, Frank had settled in his mind that it was a far better fate than what became of his replacement – Flint, as it were, was still alive.

There were days when if he looked for them, he could almost tell what his twin was up to. The faintest sensation of pressure or tension across his frame would usually allow him to be able to imitate, and after a moment, deduce a logical chain of events.

Flint seemed to be moving around within a given small environment at the moment – either a compound grounds or the interior of a starship – and had not done anything particularly strenuous since the boiling incident.

But the sorrow… it was puzzling. Given perspective, it would have been as if Frank had just watched Steve and Brandon both die, and all he had left were his parents.

What had happened to Flint to make him feel that way?

.

**September 11, 2525**

It was a very interesting day. Frank felt that whenever Flint moved, it was disturbance enough to his hyper-attuned senses to wake or disturb Frank. He'd heard that some twins lost their bond over time, mainly due to lack of exercise. He almost got the feeling that Flint had begun to shut him out; if he knocked against something by accident and it hurt, Flint never responded with any indicators that he'd felt it. But he was a busy kid… and Frank was the one who felt he'd been wronged by the disappearance of his twin and had spent all the years since the alien's death fine-tuning his ability to tell what his brother was up to.

Today, it seemed, was a turning point in that endeavor.

Frank had stepped out onto the track, but he found he almost couldn't make himself run. He wanted to zigzag and fold back upon a certain area. If it hadn't been as big a track as it was, sporting as much open space as it did, that might have become an issue.

Since there was plenty of space to move in, though, Frank let it go – he'd follow Flint today, and try to figure out what he was up to. Like his missing twin, Frank was feeling rather good today. Since the boiling back in March, Frank had begun to pick up subtle hints that whatever it had been, it had something to do with a set of improvements to the human condition.

Flint had been… what was the word?… augmented.

Frank knew he was only as human as he'd been before, but there were days when he too felt somewhat better suited to harsher tasks than he should have been. Perhaps the depth of his attachment to the bond he shared was what had done it – the nervous system could only stimulate for so long before the surrounding tissues responded. Case in point – Frank could _still_ see damn near perfectly, even through haze, poor lighting, and sometimes, the very pitch of darkness wasn't black enough to stop him from successfully navigating.

His following of his brother's motions kept him up to speed – almost literally – with what he figured was probably really going on. Still, somehow, Flint was fast as a speeding bullet now and every time Frank stepped after him, he always felt that while they both began and both stopped moving at the same instant, Flint had always covered more distance than Frank could.

Which only lent more still to the idea that the boiling had made physical improvements.

Today, Frank felt assured that Flint was doing some kind of mission. It wasn't long before several of the other students gathering to use the track began to sift into a crowd, watching him go seemingly nuts in a million directions across the track. Frank didn't care – they could watch.

When the football jock that was always giving Brandon hell for being black decided to step in, Frank turned to see him approaching right as he felt the knuckles of his left hand compress tightly.

_Smack!_ Flint had just punched the living daylights out of someone.

Frank twitched, fighting to remain still as he watched the bigger, older boy draw near. When he got a little less than four strides away, he spoke.

"Something wrong with your brain, retard? There are people want to use this track and you're in the way."

Frank clenched his fists, trembling as he felt Flint bring down two more people, and then move on, all in a lightning blur of motion. He was fast – and efficient.

"Hey! Retard! I'm talking to you!" The jock insisted, stepping closer in an attempt to be intimidating. "Get off the track, already."

Frank tipped a blonde eyebrow at him, wondering if the next victim was soon or if he'd have to duck and run. He almost felt inadequate, but if he could borrow his brother's training techniques, he'd likely put the jock down without breaking a sweat.

Or getting hit. Angry at being ignored, and more so at the expression lent him when he finally felt he'd gained some of Frank's attention, the jock rolled his over-built shoulders back, and balled his own hands into fists. He waved one in Frank's face. "How about I feed you your face, retard? Would you like that?"

_Flint balanced left._

_He caught the reaching fist and turned it sideways, unbalancing his opponent, slugged his other fist into that elbow and completed his turn to roll the opponent over his shoulders and throw him onto the ground behind himself, using the broken arm as a lever. He dropped on his knees, curled for the pain and therefore not fully flattened yet._

_Flint dropped the arm with the broken elbow._

_He got a fistful of fabric off the back of his opponent with his right hand, lifted him so his back arched, and slugged the other in the kidney so he twisted involuntarily in his grasp. When he completed the turn and came about to face past Flint's right, he was already balanced left again so he brought up his right knee and buried it in his opponent's belly with enough force to tear the fabric out of his grasp and send the victim into a crippled sprawl on his back._

_Flint moved on._

Frank looked down at the sprawled jock, a little awed… he hadn't taken a single hit, and he'd felled a boy bigger than him inside of a single minute. He wouldn't be playing much football for a while after this, either… but now Frank might be in a _shitload_ of trouble.

They'd test him for performance enhancing drugs, then question his sanity, then give him detention. Any credits he had for college might get docked, too.

Dammit.

But at least he wouldn't have to explain to his parents why he'd come home with more bruises than muscles and a couple of broken bones to boot. Frank hadn't taken a _single_ hit. Finally, almost a full minute after being dropped, the jock got in a good breath.

"Sorry." Frank offered, tentative. He knew without looking that everyone else watching had slack-jawed, wide-eyed looks on their faces. "I didn't… um." He turned to see them, backing away from the jock, then when he felt none of them would try to stop him, he ran flat out for the school building again, hoping to find Brandon or Steve and seek refuge.

Flint was running, too.

.

**September 12, 2525**

How in the world it all came down to the same sensations for similar ends, Frank was unsure. Indeed, he got all he thought he might, for twisting the football jock in half like he had. What got him was the fact that while he was really upset about the harsh punishment the school meted out for his behavior, Flint, too, was suffering from pretty severe, withering disappointment.

Like he, too, had just suffered disciplinary action for what he'd done to those… was it eight? Or twenty? Frank wasn't allowed back on school grounds. His parents – heck, both Brandon and Steve too, wanted to know just exactly where and how he had learned to fight like that. Having a combined report from some twelve other watching students had made it all abundantly clear.

Frank had dropped the jock like a rock without _trying_. But he had no answer they would believe, so he had to just shake his head and make them all think he was either getting into a proactive gang or sneaking martial arts classes on the side.

Neither were true.

But without school, there was nothing at all for him to do with himself. Flint, he felt, was having similar issues. Something was happening and he was being left out of it. Frank figured he'd never get into a good college, but now he didn't even have the credits to get into a _bad_ one. He simply couldn't make it… it was go broke paying full price of admission like an older adult seeking a career change might, or just don't go at all.

Frank wasn't sure he was ready to give up, but as the days poured by he began to wonder if it wouldn't be better if he just went out there after his missing brother. If he could find him at all, he would be able to bring him home… right? By the way things were forming, Frank felt certain that Flint had been enrolled in some kind of juvenile military academy. How in the world he'd gotten so far from home at all – especially given the replacement – was still a mystery.

But on the final day he felt he could tolerate, Frank made his mind up.

He was going to go find Flint, and when he found him, he'd bring him home, and prove to his family once and for all that they were all wrong. He knew nothing else would be good enough for them. Given what he'd guessed about Flint's situation, a good path to meeting that end looked like the UNSC recruiter's office.

And why not? He could probably make it to the very top as one of the 'best' if Flint never got out of the game. He had been the best trainer in the world, truth be told… nothing quite like feeling the necessary motions on the insides of each needed muscle cluster, and being tugged in all the proper directions. Being told by someone external to himself would be entirely different, and it was no wonder so many people washed out of so many training exercises. Even simple ones like weight-loss programs for the obese.

Still… it would need to wait until November, if he could make it that far with his sanity intact… and even then he'd need his parent's approval.

Might as well get started with the campaigning for it. Likely it would take all the time he had left to get them to let him go.

.

**November 2, 2525**

Frank felt more apprehension than he felt he deserved to – the military was not a nice place to be, nor was the life it offered an easy one. He'd likely get sent out to do dirty things to the people the press referred to as Innies, and he well expected to spend a couple of years just going through the motions before finally being able to make a concerted effort to search for his brother.

But while he had finally managed to goad both parents into accompanying him to the recruiter's office… there was more to it than just leaving home for the first – and likely the last – time.

Flint was wound up about something. Had been all morning.

He felt the same apprehension, the same tension, the same confusion about entering the unknown. All the difference between them was that Flint seemed to be assured about what he was going to do about it once set loose with an objective. Frank still wasn't even really sure what boot entailed.

At the office, the walls plastered over with posters of military personnel and catchy slogans, the recruitment officer behind the desk looked up with some mild surprise.

"Oh, hello there. Good morning." He offered a warm, greeting smile. "What can I do for you today?" He let his hazel eyes flick between Frank's parents before settling on Frank.

"I wanted to join up." Frank answered, feeling the words as they passed his tongue. It was strange, standing there, willing and eager to sign his life away. If Flint hadn't gone missing, he knew he'd never have come this far. Frank hadn't ever really wanted to be a soldier before… it just seemed like a reasonable route to going after and finding his missing sibling.

The officer raised his brown eyebrows, the honeyed skin on his face pulling tight in a spot under the outside edge of one and revealing an otherwise concealed mark. "I take it since you're here with your parents, you've got their permission to do so?"

"Yes, sir." Frank told him. "I was just – " He hesitated, hearing the door to the sidewalk outside pull open, the soft crack of the cold, air-conditioned air inside meeting the warming air of spring outside. Turning halfway, Frank found himself looking back over his own shoulder past his mother at the newly entered other; it was Brandon.

He pointed a black finger at Frank. "You're not going anywhere without me, you half-pint." The other boy announced. Stepping up next to Frank, he looked the recruiter in the eye and dared him to rebuke his decision; "I want my name right next to his, and I want our assignments to be the same squadron or whatever the hell. If I don't get what I want, I'll hunt you down and hurt you."

The recruitment officer laughed, and twirled the stylus in his hand. "We do have a buddy program, you know. All of that is perfectly acceptable."

Brandon looked surprised at first, then split a grin and slapped Frank on the back. "Looks like you're stuck with me, Frank."

The officer wove his hands together, then said, "I'll just need an ID card to verify your age."

Brandon pulled his out, and handed it over. He was already eighteen – he didn't need his mother's approval nor endorsement. But if he hadn't at least informed her what he was about to run away and go do, Frank would have been shocked. With all the necessities squared away, and Frank verified and vouched for as the minimum age of sixteen, and with both parent's approval, the two boys signed their names on the data card with the stylus.

Frank wondered what he'd just gotten himself into… but as they left the office, he shot Brandon an appreciative smile, aware that so long as the other boy was with him, he at least had half a chance at making it out the other side in one piece.

.

**November 27, 2525**

Over the course of boot, Frank had reached for and excelled in pretty much everything he was presented with; in fact, he knew without doubt that while the basics of each aspect were being explained all while Flint was making sure he got through the actual execution of each. And the more Frank paid attention, the more Flint seemed to be actively pursuing mission after mission… some of them night ops.

Or, at least, night ops for the planet Frank was still on. The military base on Eridanus I was sufficient to induct recruits into trainees, so he hadn't gone far. Just a couple of time zones away from his old home.

Brandon struggled to keep up, but when he lagged behind in something, Frank would make a point of requesting time off from the trainer's regimen to help Brandon stay on the level. At first this attitude had earned him some significant scrutiny, but after watching him spar with Brandon a couple of times, most of the trainers felt confident that he really did know what he was doing… and they left him to it.

It wasn't long, though, before Frank got asked to help out with a couple of the other lagging recruits, too. One of them washed out anyway, lacking the resolve and determination it took to muster through. The other four came into their own, though, and soon everyone was up to speed and keeping in step.

Frank often felt that he was driving the other recruits as hard as the trainers were… but with Flint in the back of his mind and all the motions to go through and examine the merits of, he almost felt better equipped for this than he'd expected to be. Just to see what kind of prowess Flint really had to offer him, Frank asked the toughest trainer on base if he wouldn't mind sparring.

He waited until Flint caught someone too close to shoot… and Frank put him down inside of a minute.

He'd worked his reflexes to the point where his brain was a disconnected afterthought, and he could catch anyone inside of any motion, and usually long before he really needed to catch them. Try as he might, though, he couldn't seem to get anyone else to that level of readiness, although several of his class tried very hard.

Brandon, hardest of all.

But today, again, things were different. Frank felt Flint going through a rove of expressions; first a touch of apprehension early in the morning, then significant elation towards the afternoon, and barely had that passed – and Frank felt oddly inclined to move faster regardless what it was he was doing – then the apprehension returned.

He had about an hour of that before searing frustration burned a hole through his concentration and made him want to scream… but what he'd been up to had gone well enough. Useful on some days, the bond with his missing brother was often equally as annoying on others. Flint did not always do things conducive to Frank's day, after all.

And today, he had done something – likely in relation to that elation – that had gotten him a bad result. He was mad, and he wanted to let everyone and everything know it. Had he missed a shot? Failed something? Broken an expensive piece of necessary equipment? Lost something? Oh, but whatever it was remained unclear. All Frank knew was that his brother was _mad_, and he also got the feeling that he couldn't really express it the way he wanted to.

Must be some rough circumstances… maybe he'd gotten the short end of the stick from a superior officer, and now he wasn't allowed to hit him back? But it went deeper than that. Like all that had been worked for up until now was suddenly lost, and because of one simple act that had taken all of a few seconds to complete.

And then, and only then, after the fact, had Flint figured out it was a mistake that had ruined everything. Frank weathered down the feeling, really not wanting to be made to pick any fights.

He hadn't gotten that much training, after all, he'd only been here a couple weeks. Even Flint's assistance with the training couldn't make up for doing something stupid like picking a fight with someone best left alone.

Frank never did figure out what that anger was for.

A few months later, though, he found out about the First Contact battle over Chi Ceti IV. Aliens had arrived in Known Space, and they had picked a terrible fight. Harvest was gone, the agrarian planet reduced to a ball bubbling glass.

It seemed he'd joined up just in time to be handed something a bit meaner than Innies to fight with.


	3. A Rookie's Coming Of Age

**3: DON'T GIVE UP ON ME**

**February 14, 2526**

Private Frank James O'Neil frequently wished he'd stayed home, and just had the patience to wait for Flint to come back on his own. In as much as he knew that that attitude really wouldn't earn him much – perhaps more than a very shaken life while he tried to follow his twin's occupation at the same time – Frank still wished he'd stayed home more often than not.

Returning from one mission usually just meant he got to go back out on yet another, and nine times out of ten, it was drop, pursue and complete the mission, hit pickup, hit the decks of the ship, grab sack time and _maybe_ a meal, refit for the next drop, and drop. Remarkably enough, Brandon wasn't dragging. Or if he was, he wasn't showing it. Frank felt like he was showing it as baldly and blatantly as they came, and he also felt he got given torture sessions like running point just because the team commander thought it was funny. Frank did not think it was funny.

Flint was almost as unmerciful; the missing twin was always up to something, but the more missions they both attended, the more Frank wanted to go back to "normal" and get a job and live in an apartment and maybe have a girlfriend, and the more Flint seemed to disappear down into the little soldier he was pretending to be. Frank rarely got emotional responses out of his twin anymore, unless it was something pretty severe.

Frustration seemed to be the all-time favorite. Flint would do something strenuous, get annoyed at it, then go back and do something else equally as punishing. Since Frank wasn't _actually_ doing what Flint was doing, he only felt the aftermath, and didn't actually get saddled with the results of so much exertion. Though why Flint hadn't dissolved into a heap of twitching protein chains by now from the constant influx of lactic acid in his muscles was a mystery.

He just kept right on going, like the most badass, grouchy energizer bunny from hell. Usually, Flint would spend roughly five to ten minutes feeling tired, sitting still, then he'd shrug it off and go back to running or hitting people or shooting at them. The days when Frank didn't feel like he was going to bounce off the walls, he felt like he'd been drooled out into a long string of cooked spaghetti, as he just couldn't seem to keep up with his overly energetic other half.

His superiors didn't understand… and neither did Brandon.

So it really came as no surprise that everyone thought he was faking it… all of it. Even the energetic bits. What really hurt was that somehow, Flint usually managed to make him want to run in mad little circles when his own company wanted him to sit still, and Flint would be dead beat whenever Frank needed to be on his toes the most.

Somehow, getting past the "first kill" never hit home for him, though he did have to sit with Brandon until the bigger kid got over the shakes. That, at least, had been something honed down into nonchalance by his missing twin for him.

People died. It was normal. Sometimes, people died because he made them do it. And that was normal, too. Due to all of this, everyone always thought of him and referred to him as "that weird, fucked-up piece of work", because trying to psych-eval someone like him without asking any direct questions would leave anyone scratching their heads.

And there were days when Frank didn't blame them a bit… sometimes, he scratched his own head, too!

At 0500, he was up and scrubbed and tugging into his gear and wishing for just four more minutes of rack time, but everyone else was doing the same thing. He wasn't going to get any sympathy.

"Washington!" The voice of the platoon Sergeant was unmistakable; he was the kind of nails-tough guy that didn't appear to have a life beyond the one the UNSC had given him, and some of the guys speculated that he slept with his gun whenever he wanted company. Built like a tree stump, short but thick, and covered in rolling muscles that knew no failed effort, Stacy Adam Vargas was more the type of man nobody _dared_ to tease about his name.

Frank looked up, momentarily distracted, but all it did was earn him a pointed look from the Sergeant. "You're not Washington, son, keep your eye on the ball." He was also the only officer-type to ever call Frank 'son' that he wished wouldn't. He had a way of saying the word as if he resented the addressed.

"Yes, sir." Frank mumbled, quickly ducking his head and quickly finishing with the boot he was lacing up. To the best that he could tell, Flint had already gotten up and long since been finished readying for whatever he was about to do, and had that kind of sense of waiting that usually forebode some kind of action sequence. Hopefully there was less of the hand-to-hand this time around… it made it hard as hell to aim his rifle when his twin was throwing his arms around all over the place. Getting neural signals from two different bodies was confusing, sometimes. He had to figure out which set were his own, and then figure out how to maintain that knowledge as he went through whatever series of motions, _while_ following those of his twin.

Flint grabbed a rifle, slung it sideways, yanked on the action bar and pinched the crap out of the side of his thumb. Frank had just dropped his freshly booted foot to the floor when he emitted a choked squeak of protest, clamping down on the sound as soon as he realized he'd made it. Frank stuck his own thumb down into that fist, and clenched it as tightly as possible, going over a mental checklist of every cuss word he knew. It was the only way he could deal with not being able to complain to the actual guilty party. What was really irksome was that more often than not, unless he was shot full of holes outright, Flint generally tended to wince, grimace, or flinch, and then forget he'd hurt himself. The rifle went somewhere, but Frank was too busy shrugging into his web gear to truly discern which of the uncomfortable digs were real and which were imagined.

"Hey, O'Neil." Someone said, suddenly, distracting him.

Frank looked up, his eyebrows met. "Huh? Who was that?" Fully five of the available people were looking at him.

Second from the right raised a hand, and waved. A chunky man named Earl Grissom, the speaker had olive skin, brown-black eyes and a twisted grin that dimpled from shrapnel scarring when he really meant it. Being as he was a Corporal, he was one of billions of other troops Frank was expected to defer to… and salute.

But he'd been in the barracks with this particular platoon for long enough that one did not necessarily salute unless one was under greeting, departing, or parade circumstances. One did not need to elbow someone else in the eye saluting inside the weapon lockers, and one was absolutely forbidden from saluting in the field. So Frank just raised his eyebrows, and offered, "Sir?"

The other four grinned. He was, to them, still one of the "FNG's", so they often found him amusing. This was usually when they did _not_ find him psychopathically haunting, and were giving him a wide berth. "Bite yourself, kid?" Grissom asked.

"What? Oh, no, sir." Frank grimaced. Damn… someone had heard that. He ran down the list one more time, wishing Flint was somewhere in earshot to really hear it. Double whammy! First he had to go and pinch the crap out of his thumb, and then he had to do it where Frank's troop could hear him squeak for it.

"Someone goose ya, then?" The Corporal pressed. "You're a damn strange kid, O'Neil, always out of sorts, most times not even paying any damn attention to the real world or what's happening around you. Gonna say I told you so when the Covenant paste your ass."

Frank's expression rumpled, but he couldn't argue unless he wanted to really get all the way down that shit-pipe…that usually involved military disciplinary action. "Yes, sir, I guess you will."

For some reason, this answer also made them laugh. "So, got everything squared up?"

"What? No, sir, I only just got it on me." Frank protested. "It's not even buckled." Quickly he amended that, though, aware where that might go. He didn't want to get roughed up for fun, but he also didn't want to get taunted for being 'sloppy' when he was merely not _finished_. Still, he was not entirely without ammunition; _safe_ ammunition, shots he would not be called out on. And even if the Corporal tried it, _he_'d get called down, and Frank would get away with it. "What about you, sir, need any help with anything?"

He earned a slightly puzzled look for roughly half a second, but the grin returned. "Naw, kid, I'm good. How many drops you been on, so far?"

"You have to ask, sir?" Frank issued, beginning to get worried. Grissom didn't usually talk to Frank… he'd always assumed it was better that way. "You were there for all of them."

"Wanted to know if you were keeping count, that's all."

"Way I figure, sir, if I survived it, it doesn't count." Frank answered, tugging the harness down so it fit a little better. "I'm either scarred or dead, but not both, sir."

"Hey, little Private thinks he's got it all figured out!" Grissom decided. "Listen, kid, you – " He was interrupted when the Platoon Sergeant came back through, with things of his own to say.

"Alright, boys, the ODST's are aboard and locked in tight. Corporal, can it. We got five minutes to meet the pilots in the hangar and get strapped in or we get left behind. I don't want to see a single empty seat, you hear me? We drop in eight. Move out!"

Frank shuffled out of the room with his battle rifle hugged to his equipment-laden chest like a four-year-old might have hugged a beloved stuffed toy, but it was the only way to keep ahold of the thing without getting his elbows knocked into mercilessly by the other men. Out the door and up the hall, he finally spotted Brandon, already dressed and set to go, but the other Private didn't move a single step until Frank made his position. Falling in beside his friend, the pair made for the hangar deck at a shuffling trot, the whole platoon moving at roughly the same speed.

Frank rarely knew what the op was about until he made the Pelican… briefings were for the officers, after all. He'd be told what was happening and what was expected of him a few spare seconds before it would matter. Maybe the lack of a time lag had a purpose, but Frank mainly found it annoying.

And almost as soon as his bottom hit the seat in the Pelican's rear bay, he wished once more for some extra rack time. He was tired, even if Flint was not, and even if Flint was _pretending_ he was not. While Frank took the Pelican ride down, he could feel Flint tuck down into one of the ODST's treasured drop pods, and belt in. Men died in those things – from little more than raw impact. Flint tended to use them to make up for lost time, though, and he had yet to be bothered much by impact at all.

In fact, it was a little necessary… and Frank got the impression that anything less would not jar his twin from the naps the idiot took while riding them down.

Staring at the grilled floor plating between himself and the Marine across from him, Frank wished he had that same luxury. But if he nodded off, he'd miss his own debriefing, and he'd be next to useless once their boots hit the dirt.

Quietly in his head, Frank ran down that age-worn list of cuss words one more time.

.

**February 21, 2526**

Daylight stabbed through the swirling dust under the racing phantom, the knives of light winking in and out through the dark, airborne dirt. In the thing's wake, and barely behind it at all, was a pursuing Shortsword, the booming nose gun a thunderous whine dropping brass all over the Marine's heads.

Frank ducked under the awning to his left, the decorative siding on the administrative building serving well for deflecting the sprinkle of fast-moving brass casings. Several of the others got sprinkled, but the brass was moving fast enough and was hot enough off the gun that the things struck their armored backs and helmeted heads with harsh, loud, ringing _pling!_'s, and bounced back high into the air. One Marine got one tucked down next to his neck where his armor stopped and the collar of his field jacket began, and it burned right through the ripstop into his skin.

His squall of protest turned many a reptilian head up the street.

There wasn't much to aim at, but then the plasma-gun wielders never seemed to really aim anyway. Digging the brass out of his neck and throwing it away, the Marine ducked away, into cover, avoiding being struck even once by the random splattering of plasma shots taken in his general direction.

The overhead traffic cleared for the moment, the dust surged up the street, carried by the horrific storm-front winds until it was past the enemy forces and behind them. Frank had realized what it was doing right away, and had taken off running as hard as he could towards the enemy, ducking last-minute into an alcove in the front of a bank to hide behind a handy, freestanding news kiosk.

With buildings stretching high into the sky on all sides, it was difficult to fan out and get comprehensive teamwork. But the pinch worked both ways… the Covenant forces they encountered merely had twice as much clout to throw around. They had shielding devices and superheated gas throwers and self-depreciating high-powered rounds and explosive ion charges in a high-tech mock-up of a rocket launcher. That the ion charges had a minor ballistic arc didn't seem to matter much… those what carried them, always knew the math.

Looking back, Frank knew he was all alone where he was. Why was it, whenever he saw a significant but temporary tactical advantage, he was the only one that did? Now instead of pressing an advantage, he was only going to get himself killed. Nice.

He closed his eyes, and listened, trying to determine what kind of creature was positioned in what place without ever exposing his head for a peek. If he did that, he'd get it singed right off his shoulders, and he wasn't about to let himself die. He still hadn't found Flint yet, after all, and that had been the whole plan all along.

He hoped Brandon was there to see it when it happened… that way nobody could call him crazy when he returned home, triumphant in his own personal quest. Brandon, at least, had a fairly level, sane, normal psych-eval record! He wasn't going to spout utter nonsense for no damn good reason.

Two Elites on the right, one on the far left, standing behind a pair of Jackals. Six Grunts up front of the duo, four in front of the loner. Another Jackal in front of the duo, mingled with the Grunts. The task wasn't difficult when he knew what kind of guns the lot held – and what with all the Elites holding standard plasma rifles, the Grunts with a set of explosive-round-shooting needlers and the Jackals armed with a scaled-down version of the Elite's rifles called a pistol. Each had a distinctive sound when fired, and hearing the rounds whistling past him down the street helped immensely with distinguishing.

Opening his eyes again, Frank could hear one of the Elites snapping off orders, and without a sound in reply, there came the patter of feet on the paved street. The Covenant thought their position was good, and were therefore advancing now.

The working odds of Frank not getting seen for that stunt were abysmally small. He tried to wipe the sweat off his eyebrows before it dripped into his eyes and made his vision bleary, but he had to work his gloved fingers around the equipment built into his helmet to do so… and his gloves weren't exactly absorbent material, so all they did was smear the sweat across his slick forehead and make the problem worse.

Breathing out, Frank focused inward; the Covenant were almost on him, and there was one Grunt hooking around the backside of his kiosk. The thing would never protect him from an actual barrage of plasma fire, nor would the materials stop a Carbine round, but it was dandy visual cover, and he didn't want that to be stripped away before he was ready for it.

Flint had made groundfall. Impact was enough to shake a mountain out of its slumber, and perhaps it might have. If the resounding rumble returned after evacuating the drop pod was not mortar fire, that was. Flint hooked around behind his open pod, and crammed an armored shoulder up against it just in time to take a direct hit in the seat of the pod.

_That impact jarred every bone in his body, and sent pain coursing through the braced shoulder; he circled back around the back of the pod, and stepped directly into a run. Ahead was his target; he hooked a jig to the side once, jigged back again, and jumped._

_With a nimble leap, he curled his leading arm around the first target's head, and spun his whole body around behind his catch, bringing them both down and rolling over them. When he was on top, he cupped their chin in his hand and yanked, shattering their neck. Sprinting to the side, he caught a hasty, defensive swipe with a leading plasma rifle and yanked it out of the target's hand. The butt end of the weapon was jabbed into the former wielder's face, a grenade on his belt was primed, and Flint moved on._

_On the left, he jerked out a frag and sent it downrange. On the right, he drew out his own weapon and emptied half the magazine in a concentrated, reflexively-aimed burst into another target. Reaching something tall, hard, and solid, he caught its edge and slung around it, in time to feel the earth shudder under his boots, and a cascade of falling debris off the barrier raining across his shoulders._

He caught a Grunt by the air-mask on its face, yanked it off, and cracked the butt of his gun into the Man-sized alien's face, shattering bones and brains. The next alien behind it died in a facial hail of bullets, and then Flint reloaded his weapon. He slipped into cover from a return barrage of bullets, plasma and mortar fire, and waited.

Frank exhaled. Looking around, he noted the trail of bodies he'd left in his quickened wake. He knew his brother's prey had been by far more spread out than his own, else the synchrony would not have worked quite as well. But it was surprising the amount of damage he could do when he borrowed his missing twin's mission perimeters for a moment or two.

He'd dropped two of the Elites, a Jackal that had been one of Flint's Grunts, and three of the Grunts. It had rattled the Covenant forces enough that they were in disarray, and now his own team was running up to reinforce him, using the chaos to close ranks and press the attack. Confused and disorderly, the Covenant turned and fled, though only one alien made it alive to the far corner of the block and around it, into more cover.

It was the last Elite.

"O'Neil!" The Sergeant's voice was distinctive; and he darted across the street into the adjacent alcove Frank had found, and stepped up to it, not quite in it but having no immediate need for the cover anyway. "O'Neil, what the hell was that?" He sounded astonished – something Frank had never known the man to be.

Flint was moving again, moving aggressively. Frank just looked up at the Sergeant like he'd seen a ghost, breathing hard from his imitation run. "Sir."

"Hold it together, kid." Vargas patted his shoulder with as much force as a hydraulic jack might use to yank dents out of ship-grade metal, but it was what it was. "One of these days you're gonna tell me how the fuck you do that shit you do, though. Let's move, one got away and I don't like that." He ducked away, and was back across the street and against the side of the same building the Elite had cornered, pacing with Grissom up the sidewalk towards said corner, guns first.

Frank whispered a silent thanks to his twin, reloaded his rifle, and stepped out of the alcove after them, careful to check all the available angles as he went.

Flint was chasing something down… something moving _fast_. He was also dodging harassing fire doing it, too.

So Frank felt his legs moving a little faster, more responding the presence of heavier stimulus than because Frank had told them to do so. He caught up to the Sergeant and forced himself to still, aware he was _not_ on point and he really didn't want to be, either. Not chasing one of those seven-foot-tall monster types the Covenant used as field commanders… Elites were seriously bad news whenever he didn't have Flint to back him up on maneuvering.

To his chagrin, when Vargas pulled up short, planting a palm in Grissom's chest to make the other man stop, too, he looked back over his assembled troops and picked Frank out of them to wave up.

The following hand-signal told him to go a little farther "up" than merely the Sergeant's own position. He wanted a man on the other side of this street, on the next building up. Frank wasn't sure why, but he knew if he asked he'd only get in trouble. So, taking a deep breath, he gripped his rifle extra-tight to be sure he could keep the thing, and let himself begin to respond more to Flint's influential stimulus.

Run.

Frank was a hand's-breadth from the cover of the corner of the building he was approaching when he felt it hit. With the force of a freight train spun down into the surface area of a sewing pin, he was picked up and thrown to the side, sent tumbling over and over and over himself before he sprawled out and lay still, in the middle of the street and far shy of any available cover.

He could vaguely hear voices, but they sounded so distant he couldn't make out any of the words – he only knew they were screaming loudly at him. For a thousand years all he heard was the drowning thunderous hammering of his own heart in his head, but he only got his next breath in once the next century was finally through. By then he felt lightheaded as hell…

Gasping, breathing again at last, Frank raised a hand, and groped at his chest for a moment before he found the radio stuck to his combat harness. Crushing it in his grip, he managed, "C… can't… hear you… sir."

When that was said, he let go of the radio and tried to relax, too dazed and too out of it to know if the hit had left behind any residual pain… or even if it had wounded him. All he knew was the sky looked a long way away from where he was, stuck on his back against a concrete pathway tucked down between the reaching square spires of corporate office buildings.

It took a moment more for him to realize he couldn't feel Flint anymore. Either he wasn't moving at all now, or he'd somehow run far enough fast enough to get out of range of their twin's bond. Frank rather doubted the latter… but he smiled blearily to himself when he felt his twin clench and groan.

Jerking off your feet at your fastest dead run was never pleasant, no matter how prepared for it you are, it seemed. In hindsight, Frank supposed that lying there laughing his fool head off in the middle of the street while he bled a frightfully huge pool of hot blood all over the pavement did nothing to help dissuade his teammates of his theoretically psychotic disposition, but right then, he didn't care.

For once, Flint had felt _Frank_.

And Frank was happy.

.

**May 3, 2526**

Rehab had been cruel. Flint had been more so. Bruised by the fall he'd taken mid-run, the stubborn twin had gotten up, dusted himself off, and went right back at it. It seemed unless it was truly brutal, Flint didn't give a shit what Frank was up to.

Enduring nine hours of invasive correctional surgery to recoup from taking a sniper round through the chest and the following three months healing from that and getting back on his feet had done nothing to the missing brother. But he now had a Team Name… and not a frightfully polite one, at that.

Frank knew he'd never really live it down. They called him _Animal_ now. Even Grissom. It was, they had told him, a shortened version of the actual – _Rabid Fucking Animal_.

He had his own thoughts, though, surrounding the reason for that nickname… Flint was an unmerciful driving influence, and even down with a bandage as big as his chest wrapped around him, Frank wanted to get up, wanted to run for it, wanted to beat the living daylights out of a boxing bag. Wanted to throw grenades, wanted to fire a few hundred types of gun. At the end of the day, climb into the back of a Pelican, go back to bed, and in the morning, he'd be back and at it again.

The rehabilitation orderlies had had hell enough keeping after him, but he healed well enough even though his inability to assimilate their medicine made every motion he made hurt like a secondary impact might. He still didn't remember if he'd even felt the damn thing hit the first time, and he certainly didn't recall if it had hurt much after the fact. The medic had theorized shock staving off much of the initial sniper round's impact on his system, but nobody before or since ever to be shot down in a blaze of glory had ever laid there in a puddle of their own blood and _laughed_.

That part Frank had all to himself.

In retrospect, it was actually kind of embarrassing…

.

**June 12, 2526**

"Animal! Get your rotten ass up here _right now_!" Vargas had not sounded that pressed in a while. But it was easy enough to meet his command – there was ample cover traversable between where he was crouched down and where Frank was hunkered.

"Yes, sir!" He was already on his way by the time the words came out of him, but that was okay. Frank kept himself low as he scampered the space between himself and his Platoon Sergeant, aware the enemy could just see him but not enough of him to peg him once or twice, and none but said Sergeant on his own side could see him coming.

That was also good. Frank had been hit by a sniper before, and he hadn't liked it much. And the fact that Vargas could see him coming meant he wouldn't sit there and bitch until Frank made his position at last.

Arriving, he hunkered down next to the Sergeant, reaching up to catch his helmet when he bonked it against the water-shorn rock and disturbed how it was sitting on his head. "Sarge?"

"I want you to get Vanilla and Washington and get into this building here on my left, get to the fortieth floor, and get across that connector and down to the tenth floor of _that_ building and take out that god-damned sniper." Vargas said. "You're in charge of the fire team – bring my men back intact, Private. You got twenty minutes."

"Yes, sir!" Frank wasn't honestly sure he could do that – but he was mildly comforted in that he was allowed to take his right arm with him. Brandon was very good at imitating the limb, even if they shared nothing at all akin to what Frank shared with his long-missing twin.

The first mission following his misfortune with the _last_ sniper, he was admittedly glad that he wasn't going to have to walk the choke point in front of the barrel of that gun. But walking a tight-rope on wire cabling on a connector bridge between the fortieth floors of a pair of corporate giants? Gah! Frank didn't know if he was afraid of heights or not, but he knew that before this mission was done with, he'd know for sure. Waving the other Privates up, Frank led the way sideways across the firefight into the narrow alley and up to the razor-wire blocking fence panel stood between neighboring buildings to prevent the alleyway from becoming a frequented path. Brandon was chunky enough and spry enough that he just lifted Frank by his waist, stood him on a lifted knee for a second, then grabbed him by his belt and the bottom of a boot and threw him upwards over the barrier. He did the same to the other kid, then swarmed up the razor fence like it was a ladder.

That was Brandon's gift… Frank suspected it was his background in gymnastics, but he'd long ago learned to flex with the flow, and he hadn't even struck a knee on the other side… the other private had dropped right off his boots and went splat on his belly for a moment before gathering himself again.

Frank shook his head at the kid – Vanilla – as if he were a long standing vet watching a raw recruit stumbling over himself. Truth be known, Vanilla really was as green as bright spring grass, but he wasn't sharp enough to keep that from holding him back all of the time. He was lucky so far in that his clutziness had spared him a fatal mistake.

Dropping into a partial crouch behind Frank and then straightening, Brandon lifted his SMGs from his sides and at the jerk of Frank's chin, took point. Vanilla fell in behind Frank, but at a reasonably spaced distance. He was attentive enough, his rifle in both hands and held properly for once. Maybe he'd finally figured the thing out, and he'd quit being so clumsy with it after today.

Frank pulled up short at the other corner, behind Brandon, who risked a peek out both directions before glancing back and giving a single, silent nod. He darted out of the alley, ran hell for leather up the building for nine running steps, then dove into the alcove surrounding the main entrance. This he smashed with the hard polymer shoulder caps he wore, bullying his way through the plexi-glass front paneling.

Frank would have bounced. Impressed, he followed his friend up and in, aware the noise was a giveaway but perhaps not so much as it might have been, given that there was a noisy firefight going on just behind this very building. Brandon moved quickly across the dark, empty lobby and shoulder-slammed into the stairwell.

He raised his aim, circled around onto the first, bottommost step, looking up through the grills the steps were made from, then looked down at Frank and nodded again. So far so good… all clear. As one the three Privates ran up the steps, circling endlessly upwards on silent rubber treads, making about as much clamor as a single pair of high heels on a marble floor, and nowhere near as clearly punctuated.

By the time they had reached the fifteenth floor, all of their knees were sore as hell, but it had only been four minutes. They still had sixteen left before their assigned mission-clock went over. Frank reached out and patted the backside of Brandon's helmet twice, then stopped stepping high for a moment, wanting to catch his breath. Running on hills, on flat ground, or even over uneven, lumpy ground was nothing compared to the dreaded stairs of doom. Nobody liked stairs… especially if one had to climb them to the fortieth fucking floor of a high-riser!

The three of them stood there and panted in the echoing silence of the stairwell, staring at each other primarily, each wondering what the firefight was like and if anything had changed. If someone had died, or if the Covenant was being pushed back. With the sniper in place, though, there really wasn't going to be much advancing on the part of the UNSC ground forces, though… and it wasn't the only sniper in place.

Frank just hoped the building this one was bridged to was the one that Vargas had said it was bridged to… if it wasn't, they were in bigger trouble than being merely late for a mission perimeter. Finally, feeling his knees had recovered enough to do some more unmerciful pouncing, he gestured past Brandon and got them moving again.

Even Brandon hadn't been able to take forty floors of stair-stepping all in one go, gymnastic overlord or not. There was a limit to the number of times a body could repeat a process before it simply broke down the body and the action had to stop. When the fortieth floor finally did arrive, none of the three really believed it… they were so worn out from going endlessly up and up that it just _had_ to be a mirage. But Frank kicked in the door, swept the room for hostiles and led the way through the corporate corridors past offices innumerable until they finally came to the supply store room with the back-exit over the bridge.

The "back-exit" turned out to be nothing more than a window showing them just that… and at this height, no shoulder was going to press through that window. Vanilla put a shaped charge on the transparent steel sheathing, lit the fuse, and then all three of them hightailed it back out the door and up the hall somewhat. The thunderous bang the charge made going off was drowned utterly in the horrid, howling wind of a fortieth-story window breach, and the trio felt the whole building shudder with the pressure change.

But the hole was big enough to pass a man unhindered, so their mission proceeded as planned; the clock read twelve minutes, fifteen seconds.

On the bridge, Frank could see down at the firefight, and could even see several of the Covenant cowering behind their cover. It was mostly ruined cars and haulers, neither of which truly worthy cover for a high-intensity firefight but good enough for comfort if one was used to that sort of thing. Focusing forward, Frank decided that yeah, probably this was the right building… inside of a minute the trio had trotted the wire and bracing beam structure bridge, and another charge on the adjacent window and they were in.

Now to go down… Vanilla clipped his rappel line to the railing and leapt for it, bouncing fast and haggard between the stair rails as he made massive headway down to the end of his line. When he reached the end of his line, he let it go, and started to run. Neither of the other two wasted the ingenious plan, willing as any to cut time and joint-wear off their mission. Frank went down next, and Brandon followed.

At the exit onto the tenth story, the trio paused, and Frank took an additional minute and a half to carefully pick the lock, and admitted the fire team quietly. In this building, there _was_ Covenant presence, and especially so on this _floor_ of this building. Confirmed Covenant presence… and who knew if the sniper had a spotter, or if the spotter was more than one guy, or if he even had a guard at all since he was "behind" his own forces' lines.

Foolhardy if he was that trusting, though, especially given to how people usually concentrated on picking off things like snipers, cos they were such a royal pain to have to bypass. Frank panned immediately right, Brandon panned immediately left, and Vanilla emerged between them, each one noting the details of the room.

Vanilla took point that time, trotting cautiously and quietly on his toes up the corridor towards the sound of rifle fire. Closer, they began to open office doors, looking for which one it was, until finally, Frank reached for a knob and found that whole chunk of the door was just utterly gone. Though rarely locked, this office door had been kicked in without checking. It had swung itself closed again, though, that or had been pushed to, but the hinges were silent as Frank pressed it open with an elbow, leading his tracing across the office space until he'd seen the whole room, and not found his target.

Brandon appeared in his rearmost peripheral, so he took a single, cautious step into the room, glancing down to be sure he didn't crunch a splinter of noisy wood under his boot. Assured that he could stay quiet, the Marine took another step forward, beginning to be able to see the hole cut in the high-riser's window. The slice in the transparent metal sheathing was perfect… it was either done meticulously with a laser torch, or…

With barely the front half of the helmet and one arm visible from around the desk, Frank froze in place. That was an _Elite_, lying on the floor, taking shots out the hole cut with the energy sword on his belt. He quickly stuck a fist in the air over his shoulder, hoping to all gods that the other two took it and stuck to it… none of them had come equipped to handle an Elite in close-quarters, and especially not one armed with one of those nasty energy swords.

But Frank had an idea – a totally nut-job whacked-out crazy idea – but it was an idea. And if it worked, they could complete the mission with some four or five minutes to spare and get out. If it didn't… Frank would be dead and in bits and pieces and Brandon and Vanilla would have to handle an angry Elite all by themselves.

Frank hoped it worked… cos he was about to try it.

Slowly, carefully, wincing when the Elite took another shot, he crouched down to the floor, and laid his rifle on it. Shouldering or slinging the thing would make too much noise, and he wouldn't need it for this plan anyway. The carpet allowed him to let go of the rifle without needing to settle it meticulously, and he stood back up again, slowly, taking another step forward.

Sensing Brandon start to follow him, he shot a disapproving look over his shoulder, and waved him back. _Stay out of this, it only takes one_.

Miffed, worried, uncertain, Brandon stopped where he was, his eyes boring into Frank with all the knowledge of what he was about to do… and all the odds it had of failing.

Straightening, Frank turned back towards the Elite, and stepped carefully, quietly, stealthily forward. He trembled the whole way, taking very small breaths through his mouth down a very widely open throat in the hopes that it was as quiet to the Elite as it was to himself. Mentally, he concentrated very hard on convincing the world around him that he did not, in fact, exist, and that the animal instinct of the creature he was sneaking up on would not get a sixth-sense alert and turn its head to look up at him.

Somehow, Frank reached the Elite's knees. There, very, very slowly, as if afraid to trip off a motion sensor, he lowered to his own, nesting first one and then the other kneepad in the carpet, and then rotating his weight forward.

Carefully extending his left arm, he reached for that sword… the instant his fingers made contact with the cool metal, the Elite braced, took a shot, and before the seven-foot-tall creature had finished bearing the recoil of his sniping tool, his sword was gone from his belt. Something told him to raise his head, something supposed he ought to glance behind him, just in case, and his beady black eyes lit on the web-gear-encrusted chest of a kneeling Human just a hearts' beat before the dual blades of his own energy sword plunged through his back and down through the floor.

Frank watched the Elite's expression jerk into absolute shock and surprise, his mandibles snapping open in soundless awe before he relaxed against his rifle, dead. He let go of a resoundingly noisy breath, and felt the pain of holding back for so long stitch through him. "Oh, man."

"Damn, you really did it." Brandon was saying. "You really pulled that off."

"Guys, we gotta go… I've got footsteps down the hall." Vanilla put in, from outside the door. "Grab that rifle, and hope to god they don't have another one on them when they get in here, and let's get the hell out of here."

"Good idea," Frank began, snatching the rifle out from under the Elite's chin and jerking back to his feet. Brandon grabbed his rifle off the office floor and tossed it to him. "I really, really like that idea."

As quietly as they had come, the three Privates slipped away again, circumventing the arriving duo of Jackals, heading up behind them once the party had been identified, and mowed both down before departing. Nobody would miss two Jackals, and surely they were two that the three Marines wouldn't need to deal with later on.

Mission timer read one minute, ten seconds.


	4. Rabid Animal Attack

**4; RABID ANIMAL ATTACK**

**September 20, 2552**

Back in March of 2528, Steve got drafted. Frank hadn't been sure what to make of that, but at the time, he hadn't had a lot of time to sit and think about it, either. Mission briefing, drop, do the job, extract, sack time, do it again. That had been the routine for nearly his whole career… a career that had lasted far longer than some of the men he'd served it with.

Brandon was in another regiment, now. Grissom was dead, half his skull blown to vapor by one of those adhesive plasma grenades. His old Sergeant, Vargas, was forcibly retired after taking too many bullets to be justifiably alive but surviving it anyway. It left him crippled for life, and more or less useless as a soldier. He was reputedly on Mars. Frank was his own Sergeant now… and if things continued as they had, he wouldn't stay one for long.

There was a Pelican pilot he remembered the name of, but she'd been shot down over an outer colony a few years back. Keeping count of the people he knew who were still alive was becoming easier than keeping count of the ones he knew that weren't. That was rather saddening, actually. But they still, somehow, always knew to call him Animal.

The Covenant were a household theme now days. People had been born and grown up under the ominous cloud of oppressive news, people who had never known a time when Insurrectionists had been the worst of Humanity's problems. Frank carried a block of ice in his guts wherever he went… mostly because he knew acutely that his long-missing twin was right at the heart of every major battle the military engaged in. Some of those weren't even on the ground. But a small part of it was that after all this time doing the exact same thing as said twin, he hadn't found the missing other yet. That was disheartening above all else. The odds of them ever meeting before being cremated by the Covenant were slim, and got slimmer with every passing day.

Flint was, to a fault, magnetized to battles. Much in the same way those mystical Spartans were. Frank had seen a Spartan or two, had marveled at them and their efficiency, much like most every other Marine. He wondered often if his twin had met one, seen one, or even knew much about them. They were, so said intel, special forces times ten. That explained why they usually wiped out armies by themselves.

Oh, it took time. Everything did. But only a Spartan could just run in, do his thing, and run back out again without dying spectacularly. Frank actually remembered the name of the ODST who had tried that… he'd called it the 'Spartan jig' before he went in, claiming that Spartans weren't all that special and that anyone with enough equipment, and enough training, could do as good a job. He had hated the guys, hated them with a passion. Referred to them as 'walking tanks' with a sneer on his face.

Frank had watched him die through the scope of an SRS.

While hardly willing to try anything of the sort himself, his team had been selected to go in after the overly ambitious ODST and clean up the mess he'd started. Three large bulbous purple tanks lobbing fiery plasma mortars later, the plan was altered and they'd stood back and rained SPNKr rounds until they were out and the plain was scarred and hilly. It had helped. That left only one of the wormy orange behemoths with the arm-cannon-thing, and all those dozens upon dozens of man-sized leaf-bug aliens called Grunts.

Why in the nine hells anything would want to wear a tank so poorly armored filled with combustible gasses in a hostile environment – like one filled with oxygen – was beyond Frank. But it seemed they were the most numerous of all Covenant species, and he saw them wherever he saw Covenant.

In fact, he'd once seen a place that didn't have any other kind of creature there… it was all _just_ Grunts, waddling around and on occasion treading their knuckles like some overgrown reptilian-bug ape.

Today, September the somethingth, twenty-five fifty-something, he got a notice over the COM that told him something very peculiar and interesting.

There was this commander type. Frank didn't recognize the… man?… 's name. Ack, it was Japanese, it could be a woman and Frank wouldn't know until he was looking the other in the eye. Anyway, the commander type had evidently gotten a peek at Frank and his squad in action, more than likely from a fighter pilot's nose camera or something, because Frank did not recall seeing anyone with epicanthic folds and wearing bars and pips out in the field. The sight had evidently given the commander type some ideas about Frank's use.

He was being transferred back of the line for a period of (no less than) fourteen days, for sequential training (whatever that meant) in advanced warfare and weapons. Uh, oh. Anyone could have guessed where this was going even without reading the rest of the notice. Skipping over the majority of the text, Frank looked for patterns in the typing like burrs in a plate of textured metal. He found it – an all-caps reference to a different branch of the UNSC, followed by a set of serial numbers and reference tabs.

He sighed.

"Yo, Animal. You look glum." The sound of his squadmate's voice raised Frank's gaze from the tablet, but he didn't bother to offer a placating smile to the greeting. Dodge (so named before Frank met him) was not particularly fond of being 'grinned away' as he put it. If Frank tried to brush him off, he'd get prodded further.

"They don't want me to be a Marine anymore." Frank answered.

"They? Your folks, or the brass?" Dodge asked. He had all-around blunted features, with a heavy brow and a large jaw, and ears that stuck out like regular jug handles. While some people could wear those features amiably, this guy managed to wear them as if they were badly affixed forehead appliances. With his hair cropped regulation-short, it made him look even worse.

"Brass." Frank answered. "I've got a transfer notice effective immediately."

"Transfer, eh?" Dodge echoed. "Oh, I was thinking they'd discharged you."

"I discharge like a bullet does. With a bang." Frank put in, half-grinning at Dodge's expression. "Nah, they want me to go be an arrogant overdressed pod-junkie."

"ODST? That's not fair!" Dodge suddenly whined. "I put in for that a _year_ ago, and they never replied, even to tell me no!"

Frank gave the man a skeptical look. "You _applied_?" That Dodge was unqualified for such a position was something of an understatement… the man personified the quintessential dumb brute. He just didn't really resemble one much until he opened his mouth or tried to do something complex.

He could field strip a rifle, but that was about as technical as he got. Frank, on the other hand, would disassemble his radio equipment on a regular basis. It had taken him some six or seven times doing that (with help) to figure out how to reassemble it again, but he'd done it and successfully. Now he could go so far as to hotwire a Covenant door to make a locked one slip open.

Tinker-toes was a close second up next to Animal. But nobody actually called out Tinker-toes if they wanted his attention. "Ah, well, better luck next time, then." Frank wasn't about to engage Dodge in enough conversation to try explaining to him why he would never be inducted into the pod-junkie hall of flames. If he ever managed to get it through his thick skull, he'd promptly decide that it was all Frank's fault, somehow, and he'd never forgive Frank for it.

"You could put in a good word for me, right, Animal? They noticed you, I mean, we're in the same squad, they might notice me next, cos I'm like right next to you, man." Dodge rattled.

Frank just stood up, dropped his nose back into the transfer notice again and proceeded to wander off. When Dodge got started thinking up probabilities, he didn't tend to quit until his biology changed – which could sometimes take a while. Nature's call (in either direction) just wasn't all that motivational to the man.

He almost started to look forward to his transfer when Dodge got up and followed him.

Almost.

.

**September 28, 2552**

Flint was in distress. Large portions of Frank's upper chest ached, but it was a back-of-the-mind, miserable ache, as if he'd been pummeled but a while ago. The throbbing punishment felt weirdly ethereal, somewhat removed from what it usually felt like. Whatever had happened, though, it was serious. Flint had never, in all their forty and some-odd years of life, been distressed like this.

Even before he was mysteriously kidnapped and replaced by an alien. Frank stepped off the dock of the UNSC _Rapture in Water_, feeling his scalp pulling tight under his officer's cap. He was about to go from being a Sergeant to being a rookie again, so he felt it reasonable to wear it at least one more time before it became inappropriate to do so.

But as the undress-uniformed ODST sent to get him looked him over, Frank got that sinking feeling that he always had right before Flint did something terrible. Only this time it was much worse than terrible. Frank wondered absently as he exchanged salutes with the ODST if it weren't like comparing shoestring potatoes with a scorched world when using the word 'fried'.

It just wasn't the same…

Frank felt relieved when the greeting proved brief, but he didn't miss that the ODST noticed that.

"Most swabbies like you tend to want to yammer more than you do, you know." The fellow mentioned, turning to lead him through the dock platform to the training ground where he'd spend the following two weeks.

"I'm not Fleet." Frank grumbled, starting to feel sick. For the moment, whatever Flint was up to, it was gut-wrenchingly frightening, but whatever odious ending it had had not yet come to pass. All it did to Frank was make him irritable. "Don't call me swabbie."

The ODST laughed at him – it was a partially mocking laugh, but the man was observant to a fault… and Frank wondered if he weren't telepathic or something else equally as creepy. He'd noticed the wrinkle between Frank's bright blonde brows was not of indignation. Marines often squabbled with ODST's. This one had noticed right away that whatever was bothering this Marine, it was not that he was being needled by an ODST.

Reaching the first pressure door, Frank got a good idea of what might be so wrong when a sharp pain lanced through his head from over his left ear, and caused bells to ring in both ears. He tried valiantly to hide his grimace, and thanked whatever gods there were that the moment had come when the ODST leading him around had had his back fully turned, and his attention elsewhere. The door opened, and they resumed walking.

Frank's stomach flipped, so he set his jaw and tried not to breathe… it didn't help much but it gave him something else to think about than his endangered twin. Whatever in the ninth hell Flint was doing, it had not only rumpled Flint, it had rumpled Frank. The induction into the ODST classification was no time to be having twin-trouble, though. They'd ditch him for medical issues at the drop of a hat. And where he went from there would be very much in question.

Feeling himself start to sweat, Frank adjusted his grip on his duffel and pulled it upward to sling it over a shoulder, holding it at the crook of that wrist and trying to use the motions – each one however subtle – to offset his over-used link to his brother. For once, he wished he hadn't put so much effort into keeping that link so open. If Flint had done anything except the opposite, Frank would be rather surprised. Perhaps he'd been the smart one.

Being both in the war-besotted military, perhaps it was very much the smart thing to do. Frank had been shot full of holes enough times – and so had Flint – that he understood that each soldier got enough battle-wear to not need to share with someone else's. But Frank always had… for all this time, he'd justified the burden of non-injury-related pain in that it let him know his search for his twin was not in vain. Flint was out there. The massive amounts of trouble he was in was testament to that.

They reached the far end of a long corridor with doors along both sides and stopped again at the one with the keypad. Frank looked around, then back the way they'd come, then tried to focus on the ODST, wondering what the fellow looked like in full battle rattle. He was neither broad nor narrow shouldered, seeming more or less average with all average features. If his hair had been an unremarkable brown, he might have passed as the type of guy who could vanish into any crowd under any circumstances.

But it had distinctive auburn highlights, and Frank could tell that that tan was unnatural. The man had to have burnt bright red a dozen times in order to get that dark. And he was still paler than Frank. Being an O'Neil made him from the kind of bloodline that would make him white as a ghost if he avoided the sun for more than a week. Those types came in the redheaded and blonde variety, with the occasional rare brunette thrown in for spice.

Being a blonde looking at a redhead, Frank felt pretty sure he was looking at a variation to his own theme… Celts were notoriously difficult to kill. It made sense that this guy was an ODST… though Frank would have rathered not be one. He just hadn't been given the time to find and file the proper paperwork to tell the brass no on this one.

Bummer.

The thought struck, completed, and was off on its way to memory to be replaced by more recent thoughts when the ODST turned around and made eye contact at the exact same moment that Flint hit something so hard, it speared through him.

Frank's view of the world went topsy in a heartbeat, and he heard the ODST yell something, but he was already going down, and he knew it. Flint was fading out, too, but also painfully aware of what was happening around his person. The unverified sense of shattering glass raining around him, the unmistakable rush of unrepentant gale force winds, the stirring sensation of a fighter craft working itself to pieces around him.

In that moment, Frank knew his feeling of something wrong was more than just. His apprehension spiked into complete terror… in that moment, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was losing his brother, and when this was finished, Flint would die.

Frank latched onto the arm that reached for him, sinking his fingers through the flesh on it as if it were memory foam. After all this time, all that he'd been through, all the long searching he had done, all to come up dry, to have it end this way, without ever seeing his twin.

For the first time in thirty-four years, Frank felt Flint seem to look back, across their bond, at him, and acknowledge that he was still there. As the last of him faded out, Frank tried to reach for his brother, forgetting for a moment that he was nowhere within reach, and instead got a double fistful of the ODST in front of him.

"Flint…" Where the rasping voice had come from, Frank wasn't sure, but he knew he'd been the one to try to squeeze the word out. Tears streaked down his face, the searing, fiery agony pulling at the ligaments of his left shoulder sending tendrils of molten fire up his neck and across his ribcage. When the last of Flint had evaporated, Frank found the face in front of him was within focus again. His brows met in confusion, but the look was returned.

"Is there something wrong with you, man?" The ODST asked.

Frank wasn't even sure if he was capable of answering.

.

**October 3, 2552**

The medical officer sat back against the table behind him, and heaved a perturbed sigh. "So is there a trigger? Or is it random?"

Frank didn't even bother to look up. "You, like all before you, would never believe me if I told you."

"Let's hear it anyway, Sergeant." The ODST to Frank's left, standing there with his thigh-thick arms crossed, was some kind of exceedingly high ranker, but Frank hadn't looked at his bars to know what kind. He outranked Frank, though, so it was good enough.

Raising his eyes to focus on the medic's face, Frank set his jaw. "I am an identical twin. My brother is also in the UNSC. When he is hurt, I feel it happen."

The medic's expression registered just what Frank was used to seeing when he admitted that – incredulous disbelief. "That has never been documented. In anybody."

"Wilder, that's enough." The ODST issued. "I've heard of it. Milder." Frank felt the man's eyes focus on his ear, and start to bore. "Has it ever been a problem before?"

"Once or twice." Frank shrugged, finally casting a glance at the ODST. His rich sienna skin shone as if it had been oiled, but he had the strangest blue-on-magenta eyes Frank had ever seen. Each iris looked like an exploding supernova caught in a still frame.

"And do you hear voices when people speak to him?" Wilder asked, apparently seeking to probe and see how far the ridiculous notion went.

Frank shot him a dangerous look. "We share a nervous system. That's all."

"Mind explaining what that episode in the hallway was?" The ODST put in, gruffly.

Frank heaved a sigh, and looked back down. Sitting on the examination table, he felt like a bug in a jar… with no sign of his appeal going away in sight. "Hard to say. I think… maybe he was flying a fighter and got shot down. I don't know."

"You don't keep in contact with your twin?" The ODST asked.

Frank worked his jaw sideways, and looked back at the other trooper. "He was taken off the school grounds when we were six. I've been looking for him ever since then. Everyone else is convinced he's dead, but I know better."

"But you know better." The echo was to the same tune as the medic had used a moment before.

Frank frowned at him, too. "If you want to tell me you think I'm making it up, go ahead. You won't be the first and you won't be the last. I can't prove a damn thing."

"Why are you so convinced that everyone else is wrong in supposing your twin is dead?" The ODST asked, cocking his head to one side.

Frank rolled his left shoulder, trying to work some of the foreign ache out of it. If Flint even still _had_ a left arm anymore, it would be a small miracle. "Because before he was taken, I could look at him and know. We felt each other through our fingertips… if I did something, he'd know what I was up to by interpreting the motions I went through. Afterwards… the boy they said was by brother was about as dead to the world as they come. I couldn't feel him. He never responded. He didn't feel me. But the sensations were still there. My brother was still alive, still ambulatory. Just… elsewhere. I don't know where, and I haven't found out yet. I watched the boy they said was him die a horrible death." He shook his head. "But all I could feel was the exertion of basic training. My twin is out there, and today he crashed. He's hurt, and probably isn't going to live."

"Why do you think that?"

"Because when something goes through you…" He poked himself in the shoulder, just under the collarbones, inward of the joint itself, "here… it tends to bode badly."

The ODST cocked an eyebrow at him. "That's just meat."

Frank shrugged. "Ever crashed a fighter craft, sir? What part of any given ship could come up through the cockpit and come and get you that would be spear-shaped? How big do you suppose that piece would be?"

"Captain, really." Wilder protested. "This is preposterous. He's got Anavetris Syndrome, at best – an overactive nervous system firing random signals. There's no way you could link the nervous systems of two people, especially if they haven't even met since they were six years old."

"Modern science knows next to nothing about the nature of identical twins or why they are the way they are, doc." The ODST mentioned. "They're simply impossible to study in a purely scientific basis. You have to take too much on faith. What he's saying could easily be true."

Wilder harrumphed, but left it at that.

"O'Neil…" The Captain began, catching Frank's attention again. "In the event that this missing twin of yours… dies… what do you suppose that will do to you?"

"I hope I never find out." Frank muttered.

"You said it yourself you think the crash was fatal."

"Yes, sir. But he's still with me… for the moment. Maybe if luck holds out someone will find him and pry him out before the bird pops."

"You're mighty optimistic." The ODST Captain mentioned. "Either way… I'm suspending your Shock Trooper training until I know more about this… twin-thing… or Ana Syndrome or whatever in hell it really is. I won't have one of my men go down in a nervous fit in the middle of a battle when I need him mobile and ambulatory most."

Frank heaved a deep sigh, and looked back down. "I figured this would happen."

"Why did you not see fit to inform us of this before? Or the UNSC in general?" Wilder asked.

"It's not a disease." Frank answered, looking up to glower at the medic. "And that I am a twin is noted on my personnel file. The UNSC _does_ know."

.

**October 18, 2552**

Without incident for two weeks and a day, Frank was finally sent forward to go ahead and do the training regimen to get himself started into the Shock Troopers. Day one was okay. It was a little like basic training with all the variables amped up. Frank felt sluggish, knowing his twin was not moving. He'd gotten up and walked somewhat for a span, but he hadn't gone that far. His steps had dragged, his motions felt weak and slow to Frank. There was no doubt in his mind that the injury the crash had given him was significant – it was enough to slow his energizer bunny self down.

The fact saddened him considerably. At present, Flint had not moved hardly a muscle to even stand up in several days. If he was on medical leave, that was good. Hopefully someone was tending him properly.

On a thin foam pad facing off with a trainer who had told him to treat him like he was an Elite, Frank had just about put the man down when he felt Flint move again. He slowly stood up, seeming to amble more than walk. Frank finished his twisting flip and brought the mock-Elite down on his belly, both arms captured up behind his back and one of Frank's hands pressed into the back of the man's head.

Without even waiting for the call to do so, Frank shifted backwards, and let go, standing up apart from the trainer. The guy emitted a gag sound, though it was more than likely an expression than any exhalation. He pushed to his knees and twisted around to look back and up at Frank. "You got a grip like a vise."

"I practiced." Frank admitted, quietly. "Done this before."

"Jujitsu?"

"Nope… no formal training aside from boot." Frank shrugged. He'd refrained from mentioning the fact that he'd gotten most of his 'training' from his twin in the same manner that he'd done for most of his life. It had been scolded out of him enough times that he'd finally fallen out of the habit of finishing that sentence. Flint was not, after all, a 'formal' trainer. He'd just been easy to follow when he moved.

The trainer was not a small man, towering over Frank in much the same way that Brandon had, but Frank was used to seeing such men about and was not especially intimidated. Even once the trainer had gotten a hand around Frank's arm, it hadn't saved him much from being flattened in a tangled ball. He stood himself up, dusted his palms on his thighs, and turned around to face Frank again. "Again."

"Okay." Frank answered, obtaining the traditional stance of fight-readiness. He'd found over the years that he really didn't need it, but it helped his trainer opponent recognize that he was not ignoring the man or his instruction.

The trainer moved to engage right as Flint moved aggressively, twisting sideways. Confused, Frank followed, ducking right out of the way. Flint tore the other direction, grabbing a fistful of midsection and giving it a vicious yank. He brought up a leg, and seated that boot into the side under his fist, then let go and kicked hard enough to lift himself off the floor.

As the opponent staggered back, he hit the ground, yanked on something on the other side of him, twisted around and stuck his other leg out to sock the unfortunate other in the head with that boot. Frank's trainer didn't go down right away, but he looked shell shocked at Frank's sudden speed and his method of attack going so sideways. Before he could recover at all, Flint surged forward two steps, hauling something heavy along with, then backtracked into it, and on the rebound he shouldered into the initial target, and it seemed to slip right out of gravity when it fell away.

Had he just pushed someone off a high ledge?

Frank's trainer overbalanced and hit the mat with a loud whump. "Ugh! Damn, O'Neil! Quit a moment!"

Frank stepped back several paces, almost fully off the mat, getting that sinking feeling again. "Okay… okay…" This was bad.

Seeing his expression work down into a cross between apprehension and terror, the trainer sat up and looked at him curiously. "O'Neil…? You alright?"

"I… no." Frank decided, suddenly. Someone pulled Flint out into a splay, as if he'd been tied to two separate trees. Though if the trees were really trees, Frank wasn't sure. Regardless, the posture was not a good one, nor did it bode well given that he'd just had to fight off someone who was pulling him somewhere. Flint kicked someone else, and they too went off in freefall.

The sinking pit went deeper, as a welling sense of foreboding sank in with a sense of permanency. Frank watched as the trainer stood up, and walked towards him. "Hey, look at me." He grabbed Frank's chin, and peered into his eyes, checking first for some indication of a latent head injury. He had managed to smack Frank in the noggin once, but it had been a glancing blow and hadn't even hurt. Frank lifted his chin out of the man's hand and shook his head, clenching his fists.

Why was Flint tied up to two wide-set posts? Hadn't he been picked up by a UNSC ship and been sitting in a medbay all this time? To Frank's knowledge, the UNSC didn't have a medical procedure that involved being tied to standing pillars as if one were the vitruvian man.

"Simmons! Fetch me Wilder, I got me a feeling." The trainer beckoned, to a man across the room. Simmons jumped up and left the room almost instantly, but Frank was focused inward.

There was a moment of absolute calm, as if all that was wrong had suddenly been alleviated, but the moment passed, and right as Frank looked up at the trainer he'd been sparring with a moment before, he felt heat circle one wrist.

"Oh… fuck…"

"What?" The trainer asked, confused.

Frank knew what was coming before it came, but he didn't have time to react. He focused his blue eyes on the trainer with the most piercing expression for one single millisecond, and then he stiffened with a look of sudden pain. He got only a single gasp of air out as his arms hugged inward, clutching at empty air, then the whole world went black.

"O'Neil!"

.

**October 19, 2552**

Frank railed off the table with the most pained scream he'd ever emitted. He caught the medic on his right in both hands and throttled him as he bore his whole weight down on him, bringing both to the floor. Hands grabbed at him from all sides and hauled him free of his victim before he could crush the larynx and seal the man's fate, but he only fought them for a moment, before all life seemed to drain away, and he relaxed completely into total limpness.

At first his breath was ragged, but as he blinked the film out of his eyes and tried to look around, he found the world a colorless place indeed. Masked faces floated in and out of view at all angles, and as the bands cinched around his wrists to hold him down, the monitor dots were reaffixed to his chest where he'd ripped them free by extending beyond the length of their attached wires.

He inhaled once, tasting the air. It was dry, and stale. Exhaling, he felt his whole body tingled as if he'd been recently stabbed by a thousand tiny needles. As the initial buzz of motion died back, an unmasked face joined the masked ones, and came to rest looking down at him from the right. The expression on the Captain's sienna face was grim and set, but he had a look in his eyes Frank decided he didn't like much at all.

That was the look of a man who had come to his own conclusions, and had bad news.

.

**October 22, 2552**

Frank felt empty. He wasn't sure which way was up, anymore, but every time he checked, it was the same direction as last time. The notion just didn't come naturally anymore. He didn't feel dead… not so much. But he did feel hollow, and as if the world had a wholly other quality that he'd never before witnessed. One thing he did not need to be told, though, was that his twin was finally and truly gone.

Flint was dead.

What held in the place of the broken connection was the seething, burning hatred of what had happened to him. Frank was now more or less convinced that the UNSC had not, after all, come for his brother, and rescued him from the crash. Instead, it was the Covenant, and they had murdered him after a brief stay in captivity.

What Frank was not expecting was to be called into the Captain's office on the second day after being revived… according to Wilder, his nervous system had spiked so hard it overloaded his cardiovascular system and shut it down… a self-inflicted heart attack, more or less. Frank knew it was because of what had happened to Flint. He'd felt it… whatever it really had been… and it had had the same after effects.

Sitting wearily in the chair across the desk from the Captain – his name was Cummins, Frank had learned, with the callsign Adept – Frank nodded his greeting to the man. If Frank ever did manage to become an ODST, he well imagined his career as one would be short indeed. "Sir."

Cummins began with the heaving of a sigh.

Frank quirked a brow. That was odd.

"I have something I want you to see." Cummins said, reaching up to the display of his office computing unit and turned it around so Frank could see it. Captured in still-frame was the opening shot of what looked like a video. Frank glanced at it once, looking back at Cummins before focusing on the screen. He couldn't see much… it was what looked like a bajillion colored que-tips lined up on the farthest possible shot of a Covenant super structure.

"What is…?" Frank began, but then Cummins hit 'play'.

The video clarified, and panned about to show a much closer image. The face of a strange creature Frank wasn't sure of the origins of appeared, and words poured through the speakers on the desk's top. "The Great Journey is not for the infidels, or the weak of heart. All Humans will burn in the fires of our ascension, and not one will live to witness our glorious salvation!" Frank suspected it lasted a bit longer than that, but Cummins fast-forwarded through the rest of the speech to the part where the camera swung away from the robed, bearded creature with the long neck. "Here, one of your wretched Demons… watch how helplessly he dies!" A thin, bony arm extended from the alien, to point at a Spartan in Mjolnir armor. He looked quite well beaten, with soot and dirt and old blood caked across his combat skin, the metal of which was pocked and dented heavily with sign of harsh wear. Across one side of his breastplate were the telling lines of traumatic fracture, with an angular hole punched through the armor itself just under the raised pauldron on the left. The fellow had been tied between a pair of freestanding pylons, but what held him were energy cuffs on invisible energy cables… and no matter how hard he pulled on them, they didn't budge more than a quarter of an inch.

Frank's brow knit as he watched the supersoldier haul back with all his might, digging coils of metal out of the flooring with his boots until a hairy beast that resembled a giant ape circled around in front of him and barked something. In response, the Spartan reached forward, smashed his face off the beast's snout, then kicked it in the guts so it flipped over itself and promptly tumbled off the far edge of the suspended platform.

"Why are you showing me this?" Frank asked, confused.

"This hit every channel, every frequency, on all the airwaves from here to the dark space outside our galaxy in the same hour you went down." Cummins answered, as a pair of ornately dressed Elites appeared. "ONI couldn't scrub it fast enough… everyone who had a screen to look at and a signal to pick up could see it, and now it's all over the news."

Frank cast him a glance. "I don't understand…"

"Watch."

Focusing back on the screen, Frank observed a stillness between the Spartan and the gold Elite on the left, with the white one earning not even a glance. There appeared to be some kind of staring contest going on.

Finally, the Spartan looked away, to glance up at one hand when that cuff came alight with brightly twitching energy. Frank's mouth opened in protest, but any words he had remained silenced. The other cuff lit up, and as the sound of the roaring crowd below began to fill the speakers with a static hum, Frank felt the only reason he didn't hear the foreground was because everyone was being silent.

When the lit cuffs suddenly stabbed inward with what looked like giant electric arcs of lightning, the Spartan's exoskeleton snarled with branching lines for just the briefest of instants… he pulled inward, stiffened for the breadth of a gasp, then dropped against the cuffs as if cut from puppet strings.

Frank twitched. "What… what happened?"

"They killed him." Cummins answered, deadpan. He twisted the screen around to face himself again, then looked at it long enough to shut down the media player. Focusing on Frank's face, he continued. "With a raw estimate of some three hundred volts of electricity straight to the heart… it killed him instantly. You want to know what got my attention, Sergeant?"

Frank's brows met. "Sir?"

"According to what I was able to gather from the data attached to this vid, there was a time delay of _precisely_ five minutes between the live show and my seeing it on my screen here." He folded his arms across the desk. "I am then informed that at precisely oh-eight-thirty-five – _precisely_ five minutes before the death-scene played – you performed an exact replica of that piece of theater I just showed you, and dropped dead in front of my hand-combat trainer. You _died_, O'Neil."

Frank's knit brow slowly relaxed apart, as pieces began to click into place.

"Yes, you get it, now." Cummins nodded. "My thoughts exactly. When the Covenant killed that Spartan, you folded up like a swatted fly. I regret to inform you that your twin… for whatever purpose this may have… is still as dead as you nolonger are." He breathed out through his teeth, then added, "I also will say that I do believe you, now."

Frank frowned. "That's impossible…"

"Why? Are you saying that somehow, the man you've been looking for, for all these years also managed to suffer the exact same fate at the exact same moment as you and this unfortunate Spartan did?" Cummins asked. "I'd say the evidence is rather irrefutable… especially considering what Wilder told me about what he found when he examined you post-mortem."

"Post…?" Frank breathed. "But… how long was I dead?"

"An impossible five hours." Cummins answered, with a sigh. "At the fifth hour, your nervous system began to fire randomly at your brain, so he elected to try to revive you. Remarkably enough, it worked. He then speculated that you were not truly dead, but in a state of self-inflicted hibernation… and all of you, down to the microbe, shut down completely for that time period."

Frank exhaled slowly. "Sir, I… there's no way my brother could be a Spartan. Aren't those guys supposed to be… orphans?"

"ONI keeps many secrets, O'Neil." He twined his fingers together. "I want to ask you something very important."

Frank's brow re-knit almost instantly.

"I can have you discharged on medical reasons, right here, right now. You can go home. Or, given that the source of your Ana Syndrome is now entirely gone, you can complete your training to become the finest ODST ever made, and you can make the bloody Covenant pay for what they did to your brother." He paused only briefly. "They did, after all, rob you of the whole reason you joined this outfit in the first place, you know. You will never find him, never see him, ever again."

Frank looked down at his hands, then up again, feeling mixed and confused. "I need… some time… to think."

"I understand. Don't take too long." Cummins advised. "But I'd keep this minor detail of who your twin was quiet… it might irritate the already irritated spooks up at Intel."

Frank nodded numbly. His little twin brother, a Spartan? Younger by about ten or fifteen minutes, the face in his memory still that of a small, freckled six-year-old boy, it was difficult to imagine Flint being the army-destroyer that all Spartans were renowned for.

It would explain, however, why he never came back home…

.

**November 4, 2552**

Frank had at first thought it would be more or less normal – sans Flint – to go on and do regular, normal daily things. More than once he wondered if he shouldn't just retire on medical leave and go and see his elderly parents. He was forty-two, after all. Not exactly getting younger.

But the sans-Flint part had begun to eat at him from the inside almost by the end of the first day. He found himself constantly groping for that lost, severed tie that had held them together for so long, catching at it like the stump of a lost limb and forgetting for an instant out of every moment that it was gone.

That Flint was gone.

Frank found it very hard to accept that he'd never get to see his twin, never get to meet his lost brother, get to see what his face looked like without a mirror and some guesswork. Doubtless identical twins didn't grow up to wear different faces. So it would be, theoretically, like looking at a mirror, without the mirror.

And of mirrors, Frank almost couldn't bear to look into them anymore. He felt he saw Flint, and not himself, shaving every morning, and his imagination would transform the reflection into the rotting, decaying form of skin and bones and mush that flesh turned into given some time. Eventually, he could take no more, and he smashed his fist into the one he'd been using until it broke and his fist was flayed by the fragments.

He picked the bits out of his knuckles himself, almost numb to the pain of infliction and extraction. Trying to feel his world now was like trying to squeeze water out of the dust of time. There just wasn't any.

Today, his bandaged hand in his other, Frank finally decided. He would go home, and he would try not to decay slowly into so much dust. There was no point in being here, after all… no point at all. He took the steps towards Cummins' office, when he met Simmons in the corridor, and paused to look at the man.

"Hey, Animal." He was short, stout, built like a tree with dark brown narrow-set eyes and sandy brown hair over an olive complexion. To Frank he almost seemed to smirk at everything he pointed his face at. "Made up your mind yet?"

Frank was about to answer when a thought struck him. "Simmons… have you ever – " Lancing pain shot up through his side and dropped him straightaway to his knees. Simmons jumped forward and grabbed him, keeping him from going any farther.

"Whoa, Animal! What the hell? You okay, man? What was that?"

Frank gasped several breaths, trying to measure them and keep from hyperventilating and passing out. Indeed, though… what was that? "I don't… I don't know…" Maybe he'd been wrong? Maybe he really was making it up? Doubts and fears swam in a mixed jumble through his head for a small eternity as what seemed to be a small caramel spot bloomed through the entire picture of Simmons, the corridor, his own sleeves…

Simmons pulled him back to his feet, holding him steady and watching him to be sure he didn't do something similar again. "You take it easy, there, Animal, you don't wanna die again."

Frank raised his hands, looking at them with renewed fascination. He raised his gaze to Simmon's face, and noticed for the first time that the man's eyes were three different shades of brown, and that there was a burn scar over his left eyebrow that said 'HOT' with a small semi-circular line over the top of the word.

He frowned at it.

"Why does your left eyebrow say 'hot'?"

Simmons gave a guilty grin. "I opened a Warthog radiator before it was cool, that's why. The cap blew off and stamped the warning stenciling into my head."

Flint buried a fist into someone's guts.

Frank recoiled, the horror on his face transforming quickly into an unholy glee. Luckily, Simmons saw the whole thing, even though he'd been doubled over by the hit. "What was that for?" he demanded. "Is there something _wrong_ with you, man?"

Frank suddenly sprouted a feral grin. "Not anymore."


	5. Zelisee, Zippedy, Something Like That

**5; ZELISEE, ZIPPEDY, SOMETHING LIKE THAT**

February 14, 2557

Marine Master Sergeant Frank James "Animal" O'Neil stood leaned on his knuckles, looking down at a terrain map rendered in offset pixels three-dimensionally arranged across the top of the table he was leaned on. The relentlessly hilly terrain had about killed the offensive in the area, and without a whole lot of air support, the UNSC was about ready to let the hostiles have it.

The 'hostiles' were not, in so many words, the 'Covenant', anylonger. No, there had been a schism and a falling out and a 'don't call me' and all that. And the giant lizards who liked to chase you down and slice you in half with an energy sword had suddenly become real friendly with Humanity.

This left a fractured command structure but more or less the Grunts and Jackals and their flying insect friends had all stayed Covenant-esque. Then there were the formerly back-of-the-line folks, those ape-dudes that Frank had first seen in a video of his brother being publicly executed.

He'd gone and told the ODST Captain that he wanted in… but somehow had wound up going out. He managed to avoid a discharge from the services, but he stayed a regular Marine. Oh well… no especial loss there. At least he could guarantee that his ride down to wherever would always land softly enough for him to survive it. He still tensed and looked up with one hand on his magnum when the Spirit dropship shuttled in overhead, but he didn't precisely let go of it when all that came out were Elites.

Frank was not very fond of Elites.

The red-clad in front strode straightaway up to him and bobbed his horse-like head with the too-many-mandibles at Frank, a supposed indication of respect among their kind. Frank just jerked his chin at the fellow in response. "Zelisee, my troops have secured the western paths and driven the Brutes out of their trenches. The southern edge is under great pressure however and I have come to discuss possible diversion attacks to split the forces pushing there. It would allow us to divide and decimate the enemy troops without overt need to expend many warriors."

That being one reason for why. The pet name bothered Frank… the small collection of split-faced alien bastards who seemed to think they knew him, and who insisted on calling him by that same irritating Frisbee pet name, was impossible to get rid of. Over the past five years, only one had had the dignity to get a transfer to elsewhere and only one other had bothered to die in an engagement.

Frank hated the name, to be fully honest. It not only sounded too much like one of _their_ names, but it also made his skin crawl to think that he could ever be like one of them. They had spent thirty years butchering Humanity… and then turned right around and buddied right up with a new pet name for him and everything.

Gag.

Frank frowned. "I don't like the dispersal rates."

"Ah, pessimistic as always. You never change, Zelisee." The Elite huffed. "I can have the pass's airspace secured in six of your hours, but if you do not wish the Brutes to own the lowlands by morning I will require some of your men."

Frank heaved a sigh. "I'll send up a scout to check it out… want some Human eyes to give me a Human opinion on where Humans would be best useful." It was always best to put it like that… otherwise they got their pretty feelings hurt. "If I see an opening, I'll send up a few men. I can't promise much."

"A few is enough. I will use them wisely." Again with the head-nodding. "It is an honor to fight at your side once again, Zelisee." Thankfully, after that part, the annoying split-lip turned and left, boarding his ship and zipping quickly away.

"…again, sir?" Thomas Derringer was the current go-between for Frank's currently missing second in command, a weather-beaten field officer named Viktor Magrasse. Derringer had made a really good replacement, with an amazing head for logistics and tactics and the ability to shut up when he ought. He also could finish Frank's thoughts most times, so Frank only needed to explain the parts he could get out in English and the rest would just come naturally.

Frank shook his head. "Don't ask me to explain split-lips, Derringer, they're alien and alien minds are alien. Always will be, you ask me."

"Any idea if what they call you is actually as honorable as they claim?" Derringer asked.

"No… but I don't think I want to get comfortable enough with it to bother asking." Frank answered. "I wish they'd just call me Sarge or O'Neil… hell, Animal would be okay. But Zipper? Or… zippedy… zee… eh, whatever."

"Zelisee, sir." Derringer helped.

Frank cast the man a frown. "I could have lived _happily_ without _ever_ hearing that _stupid_ nickname ever again, _thank_ you, Derringer."

Derringer suddenly popped a grin, and saluted crisply while bouncing on his toes. "You're welcome, sir!"

Frank shook his head, amused but fighting down the grin anyway. "Alright, let's have a look at that mountain pass he's got problems with…" He stuck a hand into the display and swatted sideways, sending the map zipping across-wise until it reached the mountain pass in question, where he stopped the scrolling motion with a pat. "I don't know why they decided they all liked _me_ anyway."

"Did you do something particularly noble back in the war, sir?" Derringer asked.

"If I did, it's only noble and worthy of recognition through some backwards alien split-lip minded interpretation, because I don't remember it." Frank answered. He stuck his finger out over the display, and indicated several of the mountains. "Ah, I see where the issues are. I can bet you he's got sniper positions here and here, and on that ridge line, but with this peak being in the way, he can't get anything around that bend without it being picked off."

Derringer stuck a finger into the display, adjacent to the peak in question. "This is a recent slide, and on here and here are open rock faces. The Elites can't scale sheer cliffs and I would warrant the Brutes don't care to try. It would leave them exposed anyway. I got some eight men who could walk up that cliff face and afterward tell you it was only a shallow hill."

"Ack… mountain-born outlanders, are they? Had to scale six peaks just to get to the mailbox every morning?" Frank joked.

"Two of them, yes sir. The others didn't have a mailbox growing up, sir."

Frank choked.

.

February 16, 2557 Problems had arisen in many very interesting ways. Going over to the area in a Pelican to run his eyes over the terrain once just to be sure what he was looking at, Frank had encountered all sorts of interesting things; the first and foremost being that which blew the Phantom riding his Pelican's flank right out of the sky.

As the trailing debris sailed groundward to a steep slope dotted with high, jutting rocks, Frank shouldered into the rear of the cockpit. "Shit! Is there anyone else in the area?" He asked, staring down at the falling, burning debris with a strange sense of horror. He wasn't really used to feeling anger when Elite troops were lost, but that missile had not been aimed at the Phantom that it destroyed. The bird had nosed – and quite suddenly – in front of the Pelican without preamble or word, and very promptly erupted.

Frank had not seen the missile, if indeed that was what it had been, and nor had his pilot. The aforementioned individual shook his helmeted head. "No, sir, nothing that can get to that wreckage before the Brutes do. If there are any survivors in that debris, they'll be outnumbered and slaughtered."

Frank ground his teeth. Agh. "Alright, take us down – and _fast_. I don't want tube two to hit what tube one was aiming at!"

"Sir, there's only – "

"Just _do_ it, Atwood!" Frank snarled. "Take us down! And get me as close to that wreckage as you can – but _don't land_."

"… aye, sir." The pilot spun the bird, and they began to drop, in time for Frank to feel a concussive wave shoot over the roof. He saw nothing.

That was close timing.

Towering evergreens soon masked the plummeting Pelican, the tumbling, splashed debris of the Phantom below already scattered amid the rocks. As the Pelican dropped, Frank grabbed a gear harness and pulled it on. He hadn't come looking for a fight, though he'd known he might well find one anyway, and there were six Marines in the bird with him for just that very reason. In fact, it was more because he had _not_ expected the Phantom to take that fall _for_ him.

It made him wonder more and more just what exactly '_Zelisee_' truly meant.

Sixteen feet over the crags of a rocky knoll protruding off the elbow of the mountainside, the pilot called back the all-stop. Any lower and he would risk crashing the bird, either by banging it against the hillside or tangling up in the trees. And nobody expressly wanted to walk home over this terrain.

Three Marines on a side all clipped rappel lines at once and dropped out of the Pelican's back, with Frank hitting a catch line on an existing rappel and following number two from the left down. He'd save his own rappel line for later if he really needed it… there weren't any more rappel hooks on the Pelican anyway. On the ground, everyone pulled their battle rifles off their backs and first cleared the immediate area, then began to spread out.

The Marines picked quickly down the rocky slope, kicking over plates and pushing on chunks and trying to peel open things that looked hollow. There wasn't much left, truly, barring the very tip of the nose of the bird and the leading edge of what Frank guessed had been the left wing. If it was upside down it might have been the right wing, though. He went to it anyway, and dropped to a knee to look under.

There was a piece of an Elite under there, but nothing worth flipping the wing bit for, so he left it and moved on. Farther down the slope, two of the Marines called up that they had found a survivor, but Frank wasn't looking that far down… hung upside down from the crook of one of his ditigrade legs, nearly in the top of an absolutely ancient fir, was another Elite, and despite the distance, Frank knew the fellow was looking right at him.

He put a hand up, and the dangling Elite waved. That stalled him. The Elite _waved_. Very Human gesture, that. Befuddled and flummoxed, Frank trotted down the steep slope towards the base of the tree and walked across the top of a jutting rock to skip needing to climb the bastard from the very base. There were no branches down there, for one thing, true to fir genetics.

At the rock's peak, Frank was able to jump and get a branch, and begin to ascend. Roughly halfway there, he heard the Elite say something. He sounded amused.

"What's that?" Frank asked, beginning to suspect he was hearing a heartbeat whine much like that which a Phantom creates – the Brutes still had some of them, though the Elites had quickly painted all of theirs green so it was fairly easy to tell whose was whose.

And Atwood had said there were none of the friendlies close enough for a timely rescue sweep. That meant it was very more than likely enemy. Above him, the Elite gave a short laugh. If he'd taken a knock to the head, Frank wasn't sure, but being hung upside down in a tree for a while would probably make anyone a bit silly. Having all the blood run into their head wouldn't help.

Wriggling between a pair of close-growing, large branches, Frank got a boot on one and pushed upwards, before pausing to look over him and see which side of the tree he needed to be on. "You still with me, splitlip?"

"I do wish you would refrain from referencing my people like that, Zelisee, I do realize you are used to the term." The Elite responded, sounding demure and calm as ever. Even upside down, with his arms hung limp, he appeared entirely unrattled by his situation.

"Yeah, yeah, hold still." Frank grouched. "I'll get you down." He had to shimmy a bit to get around out from under the alien and up to where he'd gotten hung up, but after examining the catch-hold, he decided he'd either need a V-Tol with heavy-lift gear to pluck the big guy upwards out of his predicament, or he could just cut the branch off.

He jerked the rope blade from a back pouch and slung it outwards, to let it uncoil. The things were notorious for working their handle loops loose, but in all honesty this was the first time Frank had needed to use one. Hooking the blade under the branch, Frank braced his position and took a loop in each thumb. "Okay, when this branch goes, you got to be ready to grab the next branch down, right? There's nothing gonna catch you, you have to do that part yourself."

"As needs must, Zelisee." The alien answered, still sounding as if he were on the verge of laughter.

Frank just grumbled to himself, pulling the rope saw one way and then the other, alternating his hands like pistons until the blades had bitten away enough of the compromised branch that it began to snap.

Then it bent, and his blade got stuck.

"Dammit!"

Resting where he'd descended to, the Elite waved his hands at one another. "Whee!"

Frank bent over, and gave the dangling alien a curious look. "Are you all there?"

For the first time, the Elite bothered to curl his torso, and brought his head up to look back at Frank. There was fresh scoring across the top of his helmet, and purple blood all over the outside of his mandibles, but otherwise he didn't look like he'd taken all that much of a blow to the head. "I am, or at least I do believe I am."

"You're hung by your legs in the top of a sixty foot fir, and here I am trying to cut you down so you can get to the ground… and you say _whee_?" Frank asked. "I find you hard to believe, splitlip."

The Elite harrumphed. "My name is _Ak'nausee_, do please use it."

"Well, at least you're still sane enough to have preferences." Frank decided, standing up on his perch. "I'd concentrate on my next grab, if I were you." He only had to bring his boot down once on the broken branch, and it snapped almost completely free – but free enough for the Elite's weight to break it the rest of the way off, and dropped him loose. He nimbly caught the next branch down in both hands and swung up under it like a practiced gymnastics athlete.

For a heartbeat, Frank was reminded of Brandon, and he wished his old friend were near.

"Okay, then…" He moved to start descending branches, when he heard a terrible howl from the forest floor under the tree. The voices of his men overshot the sound, and then gunfire erupted. "Move, move, move!" Frank issued, starting to jump from branch to branch to make it down faster.

Ak'nausee did try to imitate, but there was just something about walking on your toes with a raised heel and having hoof-pattern toes that just _didn't_ mix with climbing trees, and after the fifth branch, he slid off of the sixth and promptly tumbled through all the rest all the way to the ground. Thankfully, he didn't sweep Frank out of the tree with him, on his way down.

The Elite landed with a loud grunt, but barely had he hit ground than he rolled upwards and stood, pulling out and lighting his sword. "Oh, you are… already…"

Frank decided to let go about ten feet up and he dropped into an involuntary kneeling position, from which he also jumped back up. Seeing the Elite, he looked around to see what it was that had caused the sword-ignition, but when he saw the dead Brute, he burst out laughing.

The poor sot had been caught and garroted around the throat by his falling rope saw. If the thing had actually done as much damage as that at first or if the dumb alien had panicked and grabbed the thing to yank it off and cut himself to death instead was unknown, but Frank decided he liked the image. "Come on, we've a bird to catch and an assault to skirt."

"That is a most curious weapon of war, Zelisee." Ak'nausee put in, before he turned to follow the Human heading back up-slope.

"That's how we Humans work – or hadn't you noticed?"

. March 4, 2557

At first, Ak'nausee had seemed just slightly this side of deranged and perhaps a bit sociopathic… Frank had the misfortune to walk into a pre-planned meeting in time to see the guy slash the living daylights out of a comrade. The unfortunate other didn't survive the incident, but none of the other six Elites in the room so much as batted an eye. Frank, on the other hand, had been more than a little revolted.

But like all mortal souls, he had his good days too – when he seemed entirely composed and from a Human standpoint, perhaps sane enough to be functional. That he was the dispatch commander was never in dispute… unless that was what that other, dead Elite had been doing.

Frank just didn't have the balls to ask.

Having gotten the Brutes out of the passes for the most part, and shelling their frontlines with artillery placed on sheer cliff faces to keep them thinking about other possible routes in or through, Frank had gotten enough spare time to think about the offensive, the defensive, and what was really going on. It also let him think about what the Brutes might be up to, trying to contest for such a difficult place…

Until today, when he got an unwanted – though not entirely unexpected – visitor. Plus one.

Ak'nausee arrived in his usual Phantom dropship, but Frank knew it was him already and didn't bother to look up. He was back in the plascrete bunker with his knuckles in the holographic map again, watching indicator tags move around. The tags represented his forces, the Elites' forces, and the Brutes'. The last flyover had gotten shot down, so the new one was a little higher up, and the weather promising to be stormy was making the resolution on the data somewhat fudgy.

Still, it was hard to concentrate on a holographic image when the sound of the boot of a seven-foot-tall, five-hundred-pound arthropod hit the decking behind him.

Frank sighed. "Did something change?"

"Indeed."

Ak'nausee was many things in his eccentric, alien mind, but he was almost _never_ short on words. So the one-word intro turned Frank around, to see. Standing beside the towering alien was his missing second-in-command, Viktor Magrasse.

Frank's mouth dropped open, but no sound came out.

"Eh." Magrasse grinned. "Ye never did pronounce me name right anyway, suh." Then he saluted. "But it good to see yerself again too."

Frank split a grin, but he only wore it for a second before straightening his face and looking up at the Elite. "Where'd you find him?"

"I did not." Ak'nausee answered. "He dropped out of the forest on my warriors this morning and told us he was glad to see us."

Frank looked back at Magrasse, then, and quirked a blond brow. "You know you went missing in such a manner that you made us all think you'd died out there, right?"

"Oh, one me, nine Brutes, sixteen Grunts, two Jackals, suh…" Viktor Magrasse shrugged. "Ye got to understand their psychology." He tapped a blunt finger at a temple. "But I do not deny me was lost out there, suh."

Frank dropped his head and rubbed his eyes with one hand. "Okay…" he looked up again, tucking both hands behind his back. "Did you learn anything while you were busy being lost and pretending to be dead?"

"Yes, suh." Magrasse answered, starting to smile again. "I do believe… I know what they after, suh."

Frank glanced at Ak'nausee, but the alien seemed to be paying more attention to the Human at his elbow – as if Magrasse had failed to mention that tidbit while he was being hauled back to camp. That, at least, was a good sign… but something in the back of Frank's mind made him wonder just how much of this he wanted to be sharing with the splitlips.

If Ak'nausee ever learned of that thought, though, he might stop calling Frank Zelisee. That thought, however grim the first one might have been, put a small, half-smirk on Frank's face.

"Give me the short and nasty, we'll debrief in full later." Frank decided.

"Seems there's this Forerunner doo-dad in this valley yer sitting in, suh." Magrasse answered. "An they wants it."

.

April 17, 2558

This was different from that strange depressive mood he'd been in for a while, couple years back. At the moment, Frank felt scathingly caustic. He couldn't really define why, but he knew it had something to do with Flint.

There was also a feeling of finding something. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn't the Forerunner doo-dad Viktor Magrasse had told him about. A small dispatch of UNSC fleet forces had gotten the Brutes out of orbit, and there was an Elite patrol wandered boredly through the system every week or so, but the New-Covenant presence was dismally small and continuing to dwindle.

Frank had gotten the notice to pull out, along with his men, and head off to gods-knew where else. So he'd left the planetary gig to some clean-up troops, who had also been informed of the "Forerunner doo-dad" but reportedly had also been unable to find it. Or anything.

Maybe the Brutes were just after a rumor or something else as intangible. Frank was just glad to get off that world, and stop needing to deal with jagged mountains and deep, craggy valleys. Still, the fact remained that there were only two men who dared so much as get within ten feet of him now – Viktor Magrasse and Thomas Derringer. And even those two had begun to talk to each other more than to him.

Frank didn't feel right, didn't feel well, but he couldn't put his finger on it.

Until Flint gave him a galloping headache, and convinced him that whatever it was he'd 'found', it hadn't been good for his health at all. Frank spent more time sitting by himself in the general ship's mess with his forehead in his hands, trying to hold his skull together than doing much of anything else, until he finally gained some rather unwanted attention.

"Master Sergeant?"

Frank squinted, putting his hands down so he could look up. He frowned. It was the ship's medical officer. "Yes?"

"Is there something you would like to tell me, Sergeant?"

Frank shook his head. "No… I'm fine."

"Your men disagree, Sergeant. Your men say you're not yourself. They think you're not fine at all."

Frank stood up. "Well, there's nothing _you_ could help me with."

The man cocked his head, and then an eyebrow. "Would you like to speak with the shrink?"

That made Frank scowl. "Not like _that_, doc! Jesus!"

The medic put up his hands. "Sorry… just offered."

"I'm fine, really… just… can't seem to think." Frank sighed. "Maybe it's just the regulated, recycled air after all that time in the high mountains." He shrugged.

The medic fixed him with an unconvinced look. "Why don't we take a walk down to the infirmary."

"I said I was fine, doc…" Frank began.

"That was not a suggestion, Animal." The medical officer warned.

Later, Frank wondered if he shouldn't have filed a formal protest to that one… because it took a long while to get back out of that medic's clutches. That wasn't truly what had him bothered, though. The headache – constant, merciless – was soon accompanied by overwhelming nausea, shaking, and an internal pressure. Like someone had given him an IV and used a pressure line instead of a drip line, and proceeded to fill him up like a balloon with as much fluid as he could possibly physically hold. The development from just a headache to downright sickly had been astonishingly fast, too.

What had Frank stumped was that he _knew_ his twin was the same as he – they were both born hypermetabolic, so things like disease and drugs never seemed to affect them. Only physical injury or emotional tumult would cause biological changes for them. So what was this? Frank just didn't understand.

And neither did the medical officers. They didn't know, and he didn't tell them, that it wasn't really _him_ with this strange, alien affliction, but they couldn't figure out why he was so very sick. Frank would have liked an answer to that one, too.

Really, the doctor's prodding aside, what bothered him the very most was the vomiting.

Frank hated the vomiting.

.

September 9, 2558

"Hey, Animal."

Frank looked up. He felt about as good as he looked, but all in all, since April, it wasn't so bad anymore. They still had him trapped in medical isolation aboard the UNSC _Impetus of Agamemnon_. He wasn't going anywhere until they found out just what mystery bug he had caught, that they could neither duplicate nor find.

In light of that, he'd been replaced temporarily in his command by Viktor Magrasse. The man had taken Frank's advice and opted to let Derringer fill in for himself while he was pretending to be Frank, and thus far he'd had no complaints about the guy. Or so, none that Frank had heard.

It was a strange isolation. They let him have open-air visitors, and they didn't make anyone wear hazmat suits. Still, he was going nowhere – not that he especially felt up to it – and the ship was staying out in the deeps of space just to be sure.

The theory was maybe it had something to do with Elite exposure, or maybe he'd gotten it off that last world he'd fought on, or… or… the list of theories was pretty lengthy. Frank stuck to his own, though.

It was all Flint's fault. And Frank still wasn't sure _how._

"Man, you look… uh… better? Not great, sir. But at least now your eyes aren't so badly sunk back into your head." Derringer drew up to a stop some double-arm's length away, and folded his arms together. "Feel any different?"

Frank shook his head. Flint was up to something, now, unlike for the past five months, but maybe they'd finally let the poor guy out to stretch or something. God help him if the Covenant had caught him again… Frank surely couldn't even dream of trying to rescue the luckless sot like this.

"Oh." Derringer sounded uncertain – Frank didn't blame the guy, to be honest. Nobody really knew how to deal with him like he was. Even Frank wasn't sure. "Well… they give you anything to do, in here? Video games, dirty magazines…?"

Frank offered part of an amused smile. "Nah, I think they're afraid I might contaminate it."

"Bastards." Derringer griped. "Keeping it all to themselves."

"Ah, that's okay. I'm usually too nauseated to read or… anything." Frank took a deep breath in, and held it for a second before letting it out slowly. For himself, it helped marginally, but there was really nothing wrong with him in the first place. His stomach only knotted because his twin told it to. He doubted his body truly understood _why_ it had to behave like this any more than he did. Neither of them had experienced _sick_ before.

"They any closer to figuring out what the hell this bug _is_, Sarge?" Derringer asked, his brows knitting.

"Hell if I know… they just keep telling me I'm the same kind of mystery to them over and over, and it's been five months." Frank shrugged, spreading his hands. I just hope that eventually, it goes away again, and they let me off this tub."

"If they do, it's for a service discharge, sir, you can almost guarantee it." Derringer said. "Me and the guys… we're not so sure we want a new commander just yet. You're still new, yeesh."

Frank gave a small laugh. "Okay, okay, I won't croak or nothing. But really… I know I couldn't hit the broad side of a barn right now, but I really, _really_ want to do something before I go utterly mad. And shooting random bullets around a bunch of targets seems better to me than…"

Flint curled around an impact that felt like an iron piston had come out of its sleeve special just to hit him. Pain stabbed fingers through his ribs, doubling him over, and when he hit the floor, that same iron piston came at him from the side, and kicked him while he was down.

"Whoa, fuck!" Derringer yelped, jumping forward like a stab of lightning – Frank had no idea the man could move so fast! – and caught him before he could actually hit the floor, himself. "Dude! Sarge – what the _hell_? This is new, man, this ain't good."

"You're telling me…" Frank wheezed. He ran down the list of bad words he'd stockpiled to say to his brother over the years, having memorized every one. One more time, he said it inside his head like a prayer. What kind of absolute moron went and picked a fight with a… what was it, a Brute?… while so deathly sick like this?

"Medic!" The sound of Derringer's shout made Frank grimace, but it was for more than just the sound going off next to his ear – he didn't need _more_ prodding! They'd find the same as before. Nothing. "Hold on, there, stay with me. I _heard_ you got spastic from time to time, Sarge, but I never _seen _you so I never believed it."

"I'm not a spastic!" Frank protested, getting a hand between them and pushing Derringer back, right as the medics arrived. "I'm okay… I'm okay… it's nothing."

"You looked pretty rough there to _me_, Sarge." Derringer mumbled, still holding on to the arm he'd caught at first. Rather than intervening, the medics stood there and watched, as if unsure why they'd been called. "You looked like someone had just nailed you in the guts with a… with a morning star."

Frank grimaced at him. "That's about how it felt."

"You wanna tell me why that happens, sir?" Derringer asked. "You have _history_ with this shit, sir?"

Frank focused on him; the look on his face was confusion, but the look in his eyes was hurt. Like he felt he'd found out about something important that Frank hadn't seen fit to trust him with beforehand. But it wasn't a disease. Getting them to understand that – getting them to understand and just accept it, like Brandon had done – that was the hardest part of all. "I'm not obligated to fill you in on my history, Tom, regardless what it's with." Frank answered, his voice low. "Everything that… everything they're keeping me here for… none of it's mine. But I can't prove anything and nobody I've told thus far has ever believed me. So I learned not to tell… and it preserves their idea that I'm sane."

Derringer's brow wrinkled further. "Uh…"

Frank shot the medics a look. Figuring that there was nothing there for them to do except eavesdrop, the duo left again, at which point Derringer let go of Frank's arm and backed up.

"Sarge… Frank." Derringer paused to taste his lips, then heaved a sigh. "Man, you're pretty messed up."

Frank spread his hands. "I was born this way."

"Then how come nobody but you knows about it?" Derringer asked, stepping sideways to the next bed over and sitting on it. "Why is it secret? What's it got to do with other people thinking you're crazy?"

"Because they said he was dead." Frank answered, all in one breath. He looked down. "And that's the final word on everything."

"They said? Who is they and who is he?" Derringer asked.

Frank looked back up at him. "They is everyone. My parents, my superiors, the doctors that occasionally get ahold of me, like now. He… he is… special. Different."

"I never ever heard you use those words to describe somebody, Sarge." Derringer answered. "Who's this mystery amazing person?"

"My brother. My… _twin_ brother."

Derringer quirked a brow. "Dude… you've a _twin_?"

Frank nodded. "Everyone thinks he's dead, that he died when we were six. But I knew better, and I have always known better. He's out there right now. Problem is, I have no idea where. I don't even know why he went missing, or who took him. Or…"

"Missing is not dead, why are they so convinced he's dead?" Derringer asked.

"Because they replaced him. So nobody would come looking, or some other reason. I don't know. I was six." Frank shrugged. "But that boy was _not_ my brother. Everyone else was convinced, even when he died horribly of some bizarre condition. The real guy is still out there, and he's been through some ungodly shit. I'd know… I can feel it when they hit him."

Derringer gave a low whistle. "My next door neighbor had a pair of girls just like that. They did everything in this kind of alien synchrony… and when one was killed in a car accident, the other went catatonic at the exact moment of her death."

Frank gave a grim, but appreciative smile. "Yeah… when mine died, I did, too."

"B… wh… wait. Didn't you say…?"

"He crashed a fighter. Somewhere. I felt him make impact. The Covenant clawed him out of the downed bird and dragged him back to their base, where they killed him… with… too much electricity. That killed me, too. I was in the middle of trying to finish my advanced courses to become an ODST. There was a damn stubborn doctor involved, and he got me back… I _felt_ dead. I _was_ dead. I couldn't see, couldn't eat, couldn't breathe. Everything was in dull shades of gray and nothing mattered. It was as if I was animated, but not alive. When something happened… something brought him back… I felt that, too. And I have no idea how it happened, but I'm not going to give it up. The only reason I'm a part of the UNSC is because I thought it would help me find my brother."

"Shit." Derringer breathed. "How long have you been looking?"

"Nearly… forty years." Frank sighed. "You know you're the first one who hasn't told me I'm crazy. That it's impossible."

Derringer grinned. "You're not the only twin in Humanity, Animal. Eventually, you gotta find somebody who knows what you're about. Hell… someone _like_ you."

Frank quirked a brow.

Derringer's grin shrank fast, then he stuck his hands out hastily. "Hey, not me, man! When I got started it was all just me in there, no buddy system."

Frank burst out laughing again.


	6. I Will Come Back For You

**6: I WILL COME BACK FOR YOU**

**August 13, 2559**

They gave him shore leave, though mostly just to get rid of him without getting rid of him. The idea, he'd gathered, was because he'd done all the right paperwork to convince enough people for them not to give him the boot, but not enough to convince them not to show him the door.

Sigh.

At least he could still find his brother, at some point, but for right now he was stuck on Mars, hanging out in a hotel and trying not to think about how much time he was wasting when he could be out in the stars, and maybe getting lucky and getting a drop next to his long-missing brother. And finally getting to _meet_ said missing brother.

Frank peered at the foggy reflection of his own face in the window that overlooked one of the ugliest, smoggiest portions of the highway between that building and the next, and pondered if Flint even looked Human anymore.

He was… so the evidence suggested… a seven-foot Mjolnir-clad Covenant-killing monster. It was still hard to think of his brother as such a thing, as the only memory he had was of when they were six. When they had the fight at school, and Frank had been too cowardly to go outside for recess afterwards.

When Flint had been taken away.

He sighed, and looked down, at the equally as ugly shag carpeting on the floor. That, at least, didn't have a suggestion of the thing Frank had spent his whole life looking for. Why was it so hard to find one person? Why was looking for the closest thing to himself taking so long?

"Flint Jordan O'Neil, I have so many questions for you." Frank mumbled, looking over at the top of one of his boots. He hadn't bothered to get any civilian clothes, so he still had his patterned fatigue pants and a sable gray shirt on. He would likely not bother, either. But he was actually thinking about whether or not he had the money for a ticket to Earth. Mars was the place they had dropped him off for the shore leave, because there was nothing left of Eridanus I. Usually, the military would put you back where they found you, when they were done with you. Not this time… but Frank didn't protest. Not only was there nothing but nuclear char left of his childhood home, but his parents weren't up there anyway.

They were living on Earth.

Steven was… elsewhere. Just as predicted, Frank had not run into _him_, either. He hated to think of or try to weigh the odds, well knowing that he hadn't seen the brother that he _did_ know the whereabouts of and that seeing a brother he wasn't even sure would recognize him anymore was going to be a long shot.

A really long shot.

Frank stood up, picked up the duffel and slung it over his shoulder, reminded somewhat grimly of what he'd gone through the _last_ time he'd carried a duffel anywhere… ODST training had not gone well, or rather, had not gone at all. He'd gotten to go in, get to know a few names of a few trainers, take one course, take one test, then he washed out.

And by no fault of his own… it was not his fault that Flint had decided to get himself publicly executed – or whatever had happened if that was not him – on that day.

"I guess I'm going to head up to Earth, and…" Frank frowned at the window, and heaved a sigh. "And I have no idea why I've decided to start talking to someone who isn't here. Guess I should at least take comfort in the fact that that someone actually _exists_." Most people who talked to themselves were speaking to people who didn't exist, right?

Frank was still considering that, standing there holding his duffel over one shoulder, a puzzled look on his face, feeling Flint going a-tromping, when he hit something. And he hit it rather hard… and then it hit him back.

And Frank fell over. "Flint! Not now!"

As the pounding of his life was exchanged a bajillion lightyears away, Frank was grateful for one thing… this time, there were no spectators going to think Frank was having some kind of fit.

For no reason.

But daaaaaaamn… whatever the hellspawn Flint had decided to challenge to a fistfight was today, it was really taking those blows. And Flint was breaking his knuckles on it. Frank balled up against the bed, holding ribs he knew shouldn't be aching, and stared down at his abandoned duffel as he felt Flint get thrown into something that broke around his back… what would break around a Human body, without breaking the body also? He set his jaw, weathering down a rapid-fire pummel. It didn't seem to matter if Flint was delivering or getting… it all hurt like hell. He felt Flint get a hold of something, and he broke that something, but it didn't deter his opponent much.

What _was_ this thing? Even Brutes went down easier than this!

"Flint… Flint…" Frank gasped, tears streaking down his face. He felt like he was being torn to absolute bits and there wasn't anybody there. The hotel room was empty, save himself. And furniture was not that bloody aggressive. Flint didn't stop, didn't take the hint and run. He kept at it.

Even when what felt like the end of a fragmented bone punched a gaping hole into his side. Through gritted teeth and a swirling pain-fogged image of the window, Frank began to wonder just exactly what it was Flint thought he'd picked a fight with. What kind of crazed fighter would use their own fractured, severed arm, sans a hand, to punch someone, and make a hole with the ragged end of the broken bones in it? What kind of fighter wouldn't try to get _away_ upon the infliction of such an injury?

Dizziness swept over him, as Flint took merciless blow after merciless blow, some to the head, some to the chest, none of them liable to leave something so innocuous as a bruise. This was, Frank realized, a fight to the very end, a fight to the death. And it really didn't seem as though Flint was winning it.

At least he was going to take his opponent down with him, whatever in the nine hells it happened to be, because nobody could survive abusing themselves after being so badly abused for very long at all.

They pitched off a hillside, or a short cutoff, or maybe the ground just gave way, Frank wasn't sure. Flint tumbled, impacting off of what felt like giant iron pylons some six feet thick at the base. When it settled, he got up.

"Flint… just stay down." Frank begged. "No more… no more…"

The feel of a gun in his hand when there wasn't one had never been more real. Flint fell more than knelt, but the discharge of the weapon was at an odd angle. Had he dropped by the head of his opponent, and shot him at point-blank range, past his own leg? If the fight was overwith, Frank was glad… Flint was going to black out if he kept pushing, and if he blacked out he likely wouldn't make it out of whatever hellfire arena he'd found himself in and get to medical aid in time.

Before those grievous wounds killed him. Again.

Frank was not prepared for that. Though battered and broken, Frank got up anyway. He couldn't be on shore leave, not anymore. He had to get back to the fleets. He _had_ to. He'd make them understand, he'd find a way to convince them.

He grabbed the duffel, and shouldered out the door, gritting his teeth from the pain each time Flint moved. Thankfully, the injuries didn't respond to agitation from Frank's motions, and he was able to grin and bear it down to the ground floor, through the cab trip back to base and even on the trudging walk back up the shallow hill to the shuttle pad. Right as he made the crete circle, Flint passed out.

Frank ducked to his knees, and slumped forward, staring at the ground. "Flint… don't do this to me, little brother, please. I'm coming for you, I haven't given up. I promise."

The sound of running feet raised his gaze, and the commotion of a pair of MP's coming running to check out what had just happened allowed him to focus past the haze of his twin being unconscious. It took effort, but Frank pushed back to his feet, in time to miss having the MP's haul him up.

"What happened? Are you alright? I saw you drop like you'd been _shot_." The first MP exclaimed.

"He looks okay to me…" The second advised, running his eyes over Frank.

"I need a seat on the first bird up. I… have an important mission." Frank said, careful to keep his voice level. "I'm okay, I just…" his sentence trailed off as he saw the expression on the first MP's face seem to melt.

With very round eyes, the man whispered, "Oh, holy mother of Christ."

Frank's brow knit. "What…?"

"Were you in some kind of fight, sir?" The second suddenly blurted. "There's a bruise on your neck, sir… it's so black it's _yellow_."

.

August 24, 2559

Clearance had been a bitch – but thankfully, that had happened _after_ the ship had left port, and it hung in the jump line for a while as things were sorted out. Nobody thought to question the "agent" who had been beaten to an absolute pulp but managed to make it back to base anyway. Not at first.

Frank had gone straight for the head, though, once he was aboard, and he'd pulled his collar open to see what the two MP's had been talking about. Sure enough, he was covered in very ugly, rather tender bruises, and the one on his neck really was a glossy, hideous, sick looking yellow, surrounded by concentric circles of darkening colors of wounded flesh. The yellow spot ought to have been a bullet hole, Frank mused, noting the spread and make of the bruise in his skin. From inside to outside, it was yellow, then brown, then black, then navy blue, then bloody purple, then it faded from the purple out to his natural ghost-white pale skintone.

And while it hurt to handle any of them, he found he could get by well enough without actually agitating any with simple everyday action. But while none were swollen welts, there were a couple of dark purple bruises decorating his scalp under his golden hair on the left.

Where Flint's head had hit the pylon… fifteen times.

The medic offered painkillers, but Frank dismissed them, saying they didn't really hurt that much. And… what was he supposed to do with painkillers, anyway? He couldn't even absorb them and have them do any good.

Finally, he got cleared in, and the ship went to jump. They wanted a full report on what had happened, but Frank really didn't feel like making something up to make himself sound like a psycho bar-fighter, and it wouldn't be the truth anyway. Still, people who bruised without reason tended to be too fragile for the military and he couldn't get away with telling them _that_ because he'd been in long enough to have proven he was good enough, solid enough, to not get washed out right away.

He was a Master Sergeant, after all.

The trip out was fairly sedate, but by the time they made it to their predetermined destination, it had been finally figured out that Frank was nolonger on shore leave, like he ought to be, and he'd not been cleared or called back. So that raised yet another hooplah. But, the news also reached a forward regiment commander and he took the news in a new direction.

His words went something like, "Good, I need the sunovabitch, send him here."

Not exactly what Frank had had in mind, but at least it wasn't back at Mars, where Flint would _never_ be. So now he was on his way out to another backwater world that had New Covenant on it and New Covenant ships in orbit, and the UNSC wasn't getting help from the Elites with it so they were, naturally, getting their spaceborne butts hammered. Luckily, Frank wasn't going to stay spaceborne for long once he made the system.

Hopefully.

.

October 2, 2559

On the day he got the Pelican ride down, a pair of Elite heavy cruisers dropped out of slipspace, right on top of the furball between the UNSC and the Brutes. Why they had come, Frank later found out, was because he'd been mentioned on the wavelengths. They wanted to stake a bit of a claim to the right to ensure the UNSC didn't expend him meaninglessly.

He was… gulp… one of their kindred, a hero among their peoples.

When he got into the atmosphere, the Pelican took several bad hits and the cockpit disappeared in a blaze of fire and plasma, sending the craft downward in a splintering spiral. Frank and all the other Marines in the back quickly filed out, leaping off the blood tray to fall without help from the death-trap their ride had become.

As he spread his arms and legs out to try to catch some wind, Frank smiled grimly as the ground came rushing up to meet him – so much for not being an ODST, and always having a reliable ride to the ground! It just wasn't _official_. That was all.

Yeah.

Impact hurt like hell.

But hey… water was water, and it was a damn fine cry shy of dirt. Or rocks. Frank survived it, winded, feeling all his body shaken by the hit, and he paddled ashore more than swam because it all still hurt so much. Marines were there on the beach when he got to it, and they hauled him out of the water.

Remarkably enough, only one dude had landed badly, and for that all he'd done was shatter an ankle. And only two had died… plus the pilot, who had ceased to exist with the cockpit he'd been sitting in. That somehow had left better than twenty dudes on the shore of the lake Frank had been hauled out of, though he wasn't entirely sure there had been that many total to begin with on his ride down.

This observation was clarified for him when the first one spoke up. "You're O'Neil?"

"Uh-huh," Frank spluttered, sopping some of the water off his face with a soaking sleeve. "Was that artillery?"

"No, sir, that was a mobile unit we'd been chasing down for a few days, now. We didn't know they had anti-air capable munitions, but then they hadn't had anything flying to shoot at before now either, sir. Sorry sir."

Frank waved the topic off, then tried to wring out the underside of a sleeve, without removing the occupant arm. "Okay, so where's our intended LZ, how far away from it are we and is Measom there or am I gonna have to commandeer a 'hog to meet this guy?"

The Marine cracked part of a grin, then shook it off when he shook his head. "Reporting back is slow. Brutes got all the channels filled with fuzz. You almost literally gotta spell every damn word, sir… you know, the military's ABC's. Measom's been dead about five days now. Sniper took his head off."

Frank grimaced. "Alright, fine. Who's in charge?"

The Marine looked left, right, then back at him again. "Uh… that'd be you, sir."

.

October 21, 2559

The planet's name was Fargo. It had two moons, a big one and a small one, a blue giant sun, and a population of well over ten New Covenant assault carriers' worth of New Covenant troops on it. Frank wasn't sure he'd signed on for what he was now experiencing. Maybe being in orbit wasn't such a bad proposition after all. The pocket of area where Measom's men had bunkered down was more or less the only Human-controlled portion of the planet thus far. According to word that was almost six weeks old, there were other pockets of Human forces, but they could all have easily been wiped entirely out after so much time.

And communications really _were_ shitty as hell.

Frank found the accommodations gritty and often shaking from artillery fire, but they were mainly underground tunnels, so for the most part, they held up just fine. Still, under the circumstances, Frank more or lest kept a permanent knot in his guts. Whenever the next time Flint decided to pull a stunt would be, would more than likely do all kinds of wonderful things to Frank.

He couldn't afford to hit by bullets that weren't there, or socked by a fist that had not been swung at him. And while he could follow without imitating, if Flint did something suddenly, he also didn't need to be surprised into punching one of his own men, either.

The situation just wasn't that friendly. And Frank was new on the block, so nobody really knew him or trusted him… they just did as he said to because he was the guy with the most stripes on his arm.

Trying to get a handle on what was what and where all what was at first was harsh… nearly every time he tried to get a meeting of some kind – even just himself and one other guy – there would be an attack on the bunker entrances or the artillery fire would have opened the top of another corridor like a sardine can, and there would be very distracting – and deafening – action to be had.

So it was difficult for Frank to understand how to divvy up his new forces and what he was really up against. On day one he was told somebody died. Not who, no name, wasn't handed any tags. Just "somebody". Up on something called "the ridge".

The next day, he was informed that they'd lost sixteen Marines, and he got exactly one-half of one dogtag. It was pretty dismal because each guy had two tags on his chain. Frank wasn't sure what to make of that. He wasn't even sure what had gone so wrong or what the men in question had been trying to do when they'd been slaughtered.

Or even if that had been a slaughter, and not just a built-up bodycount from between now and the last time these men _had_ a commander to tell this sort of thing. It truly was a mess, and putting the bits and pieces together while under constant fire was difficult, at best.

It was why, for the first time ever, Frank wished he'd stayed on the ship. Being what he was, a Marine, he'd always known he ran a high risk of getting himself killed in the line of fire somehow on each and every encounter with the enemy. This time, though, it actually did feel as though he were going to die, and then Flint would have to come and rescue _him_.

Which would, of course, never happen, because odds were fair to good that the missing twin didn't even remember Frank. After forty-some-odd years of Covenant warfare, who would? Frank only remembered who his folks were because the first three had been there for the first sixteen years of his life, and then they wrote to him, too. And the fourth… well… look at any given reflective surface, and there he is.

Pretty accurate rendering of the guy Frank was looking for. Or so he hoped. If whoever had taken him away from the school grounds had turned him into some kind of psycho-freak, it would explain a lot of things, but it would also be rather hard to come to grips with when or if Frank ever did get to meet him.

Which was frightening.

It became something of a teetering balance. On the days when he had good shootouts and didn't lose more than a single guy, Frank imagined it would be nice to have Flint around. But on the days when it was nothing more than sitting under crumbling bunker ceilings under a constant rain of plasma mortars shelling the surface, or if too many of his men died, Frank wondered if maybe it weren't best that he didn't see what monstrosity had befallen his unfortunate twin.

Best he remember him as the innocent, headstrong, stubborn, somewhat pessimistic six-year-old boy who had picked a fight at school and gotten Frank in trouble for it.

They had had freckles then. Frank wasn't sure about Flint, but he'd lost all of his, the last one vanishing sometime around twenty-seven. Or so. But all the same, he was getting hammered to death, and he was losing too many men…

.

October 22, 2559

"Say again, you're still breaking in and out." Frank said, for what felt like the hundredth time. In fact, he spent more time and breath repeating that one line than any other words or sentences. The radio was just that bad.

Abruptly, the signal hissed badly, then cleared up for long enough for the man on the other end to say, possibly again for the hundredth time, " – pulling back from the system. All ships besides ours has been lost with all hands, we can't hold them. Sorry, Sergeant, you and the boys are on your own for now. I've got to pull out but I called in fresh reinforcements to help you hold the – " and then static washed back in.

Frank looked up when Corporal Allen Johns walked in. He was something of a square-featured fellow, with an olive complexion and glossy brown eyes. "Did it work, Sarge? We get a better signal?"

"For about six seconds." Frank confirmed. "Long enough for them to tell us we're up shit creek and it's time to kiss our asses collectively goodbye." He sighed. "Sorry, man."

Johns shook his head. "Kinda figured this'd happen eventually, sir. Hey, that Hansen kid got back from the ridge this morning, he says to tell you Magrasse is low on rifle ammo again."

"At least Magrasse is not dead." Frank answered. He reached over, and flipped the switch on the power on the comn unit, shutting it off. That part, the other end would hear cleanly. He'd gotten their message, or he hadn't, but they wouldn't know and would need to pull out of comn range anyway, so there was no point in wasting the thing's batteries.

"He's a damn fine shot at long range, sir, but he damn sure talks funny."

"And he bitches whenever you say his first name too softly." Frank agreed, standing up. "But Magrasse is a good, experienced soldier and we've worked together before. I just wish Washington were around, that would help immensely." Stepping past Johns, Frank turned up the crumbling corridor and began to walk. Johns turned on a heel and followed him out, tugging off a grimy glove to rub at a grimy eye with a semi-clean finger in a vain attempt to get the eye less grimy.

It didn't really work, but he stuck his hand back down into the glove again afterwards. "Screamed at me for that, yes." Johns nodded. "I asked him what his first name was. Said it readily enough. Friendly, or seemed it. But when I repeated it back to him he about blew _my_ head off."

Frank snerked. "Magrasse wouldn't kill you, Johns, he's just good at making you think he will. Did that to me the first time, too, and I was his commanding officer at the time." He snorted. "Still am."

"And if you call him – heh-_hem_ – Vihk-ter, would he do it again, sir?"

Frank smiled grimly. "Yes. Most assuredly. There are three things for certain in this world, Johns… the third is that _Veek-tohr_ will always and forever be a hardass about the pronunciation of his first name."

"He spell the damn thing with a K or something, sir?" Johns asked.

"Sure does."

Johns whistled. "Bastard gets hung up on some of the weirdest things."

"Don't we all, Johns?" Frank asked. "So where is Hansen now, by the way?"

"Catching a bite to eat and getting some four minutes of shut-eye before he runs back out again, sir. I almost didn't understand what he told me because it was between mouthfuls of beans."

"Beans… damn, I wish we still had MRE's." Frank sighed. "I hope that those reinforcements come quickly."

Johns brightened visibly. "Sir? You shitting me?"

"Nuh-uh. That was part of the kiss-your-ass-goodbye message. They sent for reinforcements, but they had to pull out or get trashed. So, I'd prepare for some orbital bombardment."

Johns went quiet for a moment, then at the first corner, he looked back up at Frank and said, "We could always sneak a five-man team into their anti-air bracket and light 'em up like signal flares, sir."

Frank cast the man a glance, then looked at him squarely.

Johns' brows pulled together.

"That might work."

.

October 28, 2559

In the span of about a breath, Frank had leapt Corporal Johns' stooped form, landed on the fumbling, flailing Private, gotten the grenade yanked from his shoulder and had it flung back out the way it had come in. Private Hansen screamed anew with the massive spike grenade's removal, and sagged from the wall where he'd been pinned by it, clutching at the gushing wound in his arm.

Frank was turned around to face him, and halfway squatted when the grenade went off in mid-air, right over the heads of a phalanx of shield-bearing Jackals. The blast flattened them, but the presence of their shields spared the Marines grouped ahead of them a similar fate. Jerking the last can of biofoam from the harness on his hips, Frank crammed it into the Private's gaping wound and hit the trigger. Hansen grimaced as the substance swelled to fill the wound, but once it was closed, he slapped off the excess poking out of his skin himself, and got back to his feet. Frank watched him test his grip on his gun, but if he ever got the thing shouldered again, it would be a miracle. With the injury right through his deltoid, added to the restrictive needle of biofoam through the obstructed muscle, it would be hard indeed to raise that arm.

The muscles required to pull it up just weren't functional anymore. Satisfied he'd try, though, Frank turned back past Johns and got them running for the cover they'd all been caught outside of. All around them, ruins of buildings decorated the rubble-strewn pathways like freestanding barriers, most of which were not good enough to stop a determined bullet. Spikes stitched into one such wall behind Frank's head as he ran, but he didn't bother to duck or pause. If he did, it would only make him easier to hit.

Behind him, the Corporal grabbed a fistful of the Private's flak jacket and hauled him backwards against his momentum following Frank, and together they avoided another flurry of the bright-hot pink crystalline daggers that exploded after impact.

The Master Sergeant reached the wall's edge and turned to look back, just in time to see the embedded crystals detonate, blowing a hole out of the wall and showering both men below it in dust and rubble. Arms came down from over ducked heads, and both jumped forward to make the final stretch after Frank. Over their heads, a sleek black sloop shot past, leaving a rushing, punishing downdraft in its wake. The air slammed home like a gravity hammer, dropping all – Marines, Brutes, even the Grunts with them – to their faces in the dusty rubble. Hansen scrambled up first.

"Hurry up!" Frank yelled, waving an arm at them. That ship was their salvation; they'd been told to expect its arrival a week ago. It contained their reinforcements. Just a stone's throw past the edge of what had been the far end of the building they were "inside" of, he saw the first Brute step around the corner, a pair of massive, bladed spike pistols in hand. The lefthand one rose, and sprayed spikes all over the wall behind the pelting Marines, but just as Frank reached out and caught the leading Private by the collar and yanked on him to bring him around the wall and out of the direct line of fire, the second gun rose and sent spikes straight for Frank.

Hugging Hansen to his chest, Frank spun on a heel and shoved for all he was worth, aware it would buy the kid time to get away. They couldn't hold this place… but getting out of it in a cohesive manner was out of the question. He'd stayed behind with the two – both volunteers – to make sure the other Marines didn't get their asses harried by constant fire, but getting out themselves had always been a part of the plan.

It was a shitty plan.

The Master Sergeant's slinging action got him dropped atop Hansen behind the wall, and tumbled down the small hump of rubble into a depression where an earlier explosion had cleared some away. Raising his head, he saw the spread corpse of Corporal Johns draped over the top of that hump, more than a dozen spikes standing in his back. One was sticking out of his helmet, suggesting he'd never realized he was gone until he already was.

But he'd caught all of them, somehow, and Frank was unhurt. Snatching Hansen's scrambling arms, he jerked to his knees and hauled the kid upwards. Together they ran flat out for the next street, where the walls were taller and a little more complete, and some even still had some paint on them. The thunder of Brute feet and the patter of their counterparts following them resonated loudly as they made the next wall just ahead of another flipping spike grenade.

It embedded in the concrete just over Hansen's head, giving Frank a momentary thought that maybe the kid was somehow magnetic to grenades… but a moment later, they were around the next corner, and pelting hell for leather up the detritus slope even as the Brute's own grenade slowed their advance after the two Marines.

"Go, go, go!" Frank insisted, shoving the kid ahead of him. Stopping shy of the actual top of the rubble hill, he spun to a knee facing the other direction. Just a heartbeat after the spike grenade had gone off, he leveled his BR55 scoped rifle at head-level at the edge of that wall and found a head in his sights.

Too soon for a smart animal… but he put bullets downrange, causing the Brute to jerk back with a startled roar. Shielding popped out loudly as the bullets rattled harmlessly off the energy surface, but it was enough to back him into his fellow Brute, and it earned Frank enough time to dart up the remainder of the hill, and get over the other side of it.

He'd known he was out in the open, and in a lot more danger for it, but he was not about to allow a hairy ape the satisfaction of biting his meat off his bones later that night. Ahead, he saw Hansen making the last few running strides into an underground bunker at the bottom of the rubble hill, the shadowed faces of a dozen other Marines visible from where he was. He felt confident he could make it through, too, if he just kept running as fast as his legs would go. But if he slowed for just a second, the Brutes would catch up, and then that would be the end of Frank.

But as he made the last dozen-yard-mark before he would reach the door, he felt a cold chill creep down his spine, and he knew somehow, it hadn't been enough time bought. Ahead, he saw something massive step through the milling, observing Marines. Light falling in through the open bunker doorway shone green and ablative a moment before the Mjolnir slid out into the sunshine like a jeweled scarab, bright and defiant. One arm followed a Marine he'd needed to push out of the way to get out, but the _big damn rifle_ in his other hand came up to meet that empty hand and it aimed past Frank's head, even as he felt his foot come down on a sideways brick.

Pain shot up that ankle, but he refused to let it drop him. The Spartan shifted his weight, his aim tracking. Only a yard from his destination, he felt the spike punch him in the guts, jerking his balance out from under him and sending him crashing into the Spartan like a limp rag. Instead of catching him, though, the Spartan crumpled.

Shock that he could have been moving that fast – fast enough to flatten a Spartan on impact – belayed the shuddering waves of agony wrenching at his middle. Frank pushed away, found his back against the cold concrete side wall of the bunker entrance, and looked down. One hand curled around the thirteen-inch spike sticking out of his middle, but though it hurt like hell and breathing hurt too, he raised his head again to look at that Spartan.

He'd rolled over a knee already, and gotten back up, the rifle in his arms belting thunderous death tolls out the bunker door, splattering the Brute's shielding and forcing them to retreat or die like the first one in the front had. Rounds zinged off the bunker, some zipping past the Spartan, others striking off his shielding and ricocheting back out. Casting that a look, Frank cinched the grip on the spike in his middle, and bracing his other hand on his stomach, tried to pull it out. He found he'd given it enough pull to make it slip just a mere half-inch within his middle, but the pain that caused him made him quit almost before he'd begun.

Almost right in front of him, the Spartan buckled, and hit a knee and one hand, the rifle's barrel dipping to clack against the dust-strewn floor before it was pulled back. Frank's brows met, frowning in puzzlement at the Spartan even as he gasped past his own injury. Interestingly enough, he at last had earned a direct look from the fellow, the shiny golden visor obscuring any return expression the fellow wore.

But once he looked, he kept looking. Despite the guising visor, Frank knew he was being frowned right back at… and perhaps in much the same manner. Shots slapping off his shielding regained his attention, though, and he raised to a braced kneeling position to shoot back. Frank almost wanted to twist the spike in his hand again just to see if the Spartan would react to that, too, but just as he was finishing the thought, a second Spartan in slightly different armor strode fast out of the dark bunker tunnels and up behind the first. Frank almost guessed woman right away, but hesitated to be sure.

No kidding – that was a woman's swinging gait, the dipping-hip, outward-slinging stride, even the way she brought up her equally as huge and loud rifle and fired it over the first Spartan's head screamed female. He grinned, wanting to laugh, thoroughly amused by the idea that a girl might kick the furry asses harassing his men. Wouldn't it be a wonderful insult to their ape pride? He looked up past the two armored behemoths when Satriani popped into view beside him, grabbing a double-fistful of his web gear and hauling him back away from the entrance.

He knew they'd close it eventually, unless those Spartans cleared out the immediate grounds outside it. Back around the first corner, though, he was propped against the wall again, and then the medic grabbed the spike out of his hands and yanked… hard.

Frank's gagging cry of protest was not, he suspected, alone. The answering sound was the cacophony of a half-dozen grenades going off at once, and then he heard the gunfire stop as the door screamed shut, landing with a booming bang. Frank grimaced as biofoam filled his innards, but he knew it was better than bleeding to death. He wasn't the only one to look up curiously, though, when the woman-Spartan came back around that same corner he'd been dragged around, one hand on her rifle, pointing at that door she'd kicked closed, and the other attached somehow to some handhold on the back of the first one to arrive, hauling him back away from the door and into cover.

"Holy shit." Frank croaked, amazed that one of those guys could get pasted that easy… that _fast_. But he was swiping at the grasp behind his head, pedaling at the retreating floor he was being hauled back across. When she finally stopped moving, he got a boot under him, and pushed back to his feet, sparing a look at the doorway, then at the woman-Spartan.

Frank saw her signal at him, but he just shook his head, tapped two fingers on his visor, and turned away, taking two steps back towards the closed door. Half a heartbeat later, it detonated, the shockwave throwing both Spartans from their feet. If he hadn't been already down, Frank would have dropped, too. Satriani grabbed him again, scrambling to his own feet as he tried to haul the Sergeant away, deeper into the bunker. Obviously, the Brutes weren't done with them yet, and had blasted that door open.

The bunker wasn't that deep, nor that large, nor were its tunnels anylonger that extensive. It had been made a smaller hiding hole more still when one of those tunnels had collapsed earlier in the week under the pressing blast of ordinance striking from above ground. Now they had roughly half the original bunker's span to work with. Luckily, it had more than just one or two original entrances. The medic dragged him hastily into a side chamber usually reserved for ammo depository, but was long since filled and then emptied again. Frank felt a dragging, obsessive curiosity, though, and he couldn't let himself sit still.

He looked at the rifle he'd hung onto stubbornly, checking to make sure it still worked, and as soon as Satriani had let go of him to look at another wounded Marine, he forced himself back to his boots and limped out of the door back into the hallway.

Up to the elbow where the blasted entrance and the two Spartans were, he could see a near-constant rain of bullets and plasma fire. Watching a spike fly past from the side was like watching a plasma bolt go by. They fired red hot, often cauterizing flesh wounds they embedded into. Leaning on the wall and pressing forward, Frank made his way towards the heyday, aware he couldn't hear anything except thunder for a reason. Between the Spartan's rifle fire and the Brute's ordinance – and the occasional Brute-Shot added to the fray – there was little room for other noise.

He was almost to the corner, and already debating on whether or not it was okay to peek around yet when hands closed around his shoulders and yanked him back. He was turned around, shoved back the other way, dragged along by the same medic who had dragged him before. The man was yelling something, but the words were lost, and he soon shut up and quit trying for possibly that reason. Frank felt like he'd been robbed of something. He'd really _really_ wanted to see around that corner… even though he'd known he'd have seen nothing new. Brutes, Spartans… what ever changed, when both stayed inside combat situations?

He twisted around to look back just once, but he never did see the duo… only the stray rounds left in their wake.


	7. Peek A Boo

**7: PEEK-A-BOO**

**October 28, 2559**

Marines were pretty much everywhere. Most of them looked like they hadn't had a decent moment of rest – or a bath – in almost a month. A month, specifically, of rolling in dust, grime, blood and sweat, not to mention other things found randomly lying around in a shelled-out city like this one. Some buildings were flattened, heaps of rubble with structural support bones sticking into the air. Some had some walls still up, but these usually never soared any higher than a little into the second story level. Mostly they were about six to ten feet high, and capped off at the top with ragged, bomb-shelled imitations of crenellations.

But the haggard, ragged conditions were hardly what was on his mind; sitting on the edge of the bunk with his helmet in his hands, Chief Petty Officer Spartan Flint 093 was staring at the reflection of his own face in the golden visor. He knew he'd seen the face somewhere else that day, but that wasn't why Spartan Tori 138 had had to drag him back from the fray.

He hadn't felt phantom pain without cause in forever. Hadn't looked into the eyes of his own face in about as long. Tori didn't know, or she hadn't mentioned if she did.

This mission was about to get majorly complicated… because those eyes had _looked back_. There was a certain instinct in every living being that could tell when another being knew something. Knew a communal thought. And Flint knew there had been a communal thought happen just then.

He'd felt it when the Marine took a spike through the middle of his back… had felt him pull on it. Had felt the medic yank it out, and fill that ragged hole with biofoam. Stepping over from the corridor, Tori ducked through the doorway, turned, and sat down next to him.

"Hey." She greeted.

"Hey."

Tori heaved a sigh. "You're not usually this quiet."

Flint just shrugged.

"What happened back there, Flint?" She pressed, sounding agitated. "You had me thinking you were hit. I thought you'd been broken in half, the way you doubled up. What was going on? Your armor isn't even _scratched_."

He heaved a sigh. "It wasn't me."

"Oh yes it was." Tori argued. "You did, I watched you. You doubled up like you'd been hit."

Lifting his head, he looked at her, meeting her gaze. Her large, liquid brown eyes met his round gray ones, and her arched eyebrows rose across her chocolate forehead.

"Is there something you left out of that admission, Flint?" She asked, softer.

"Yes." He briefly considered filling in the blanks, but there was too much time between the last time and this time. Understanding, at such a point as he knew he'd reached, could never be easily achieved. "I don't like the mission."

Then she really frowned at him. "Flint… we've blown through missions like these before. They're easy. Just break the line, let the Marines take over, and we're off." She started to shrug, but stopped shy of completing the motion. Dropping her Mjolnir-clad arms into her lap, she cocked her head at him and sighed. "Flint… come on, tell me the truth. What happened?"

When he didn't answer immediately, instead looking back down at his visor, she slid a hand up his arm, until she had it slung across his shoulders, her head tucked against his.

"I'm concerned, okay? I can say that." Tori said. "Can you say what I want to hear you say?"

He smirked.

"What happened? What do you mean that it 'wasn't you'?" She pressed.

Flint sighed. "I… felt him."

Tori tipped her head against his, leaning away far enough to look at his face without it being too close to focus on. He partly turned his head, to look back. "Felt who?"

"Frank."

.

**October 30, 2558**

By dusk, the Brutes had been run back somewhat, back enough that there was a quiet night for the first time all month. It really was a marvel what one – or two – Spartans could do, given time and room to work. Together, that duo that had come in the back entrance of the bunker cleaned out nearly the whole frontage, hinting at aggression towards the east for nearly a mile. As a result, the Brutes had pulled back to rethink their position.

One thing Spartans always did, though, was leave a wake of destruction in collateral damage – meaning the city – almost as wide as their sloop was long. Still, it had only taken them a day to get it done, and while it was only one battlefield, it was a start. It was, after all, only one day after their arrival. The lull gave the Marines time to lick their wounds and get some rest, and Frank had already gotten surgical attention. With his innards put back together and the hole through his skin patched closed, he felt better.

But he had questions, and there was only one person – or two, who knew? – that could answer them. Maybe ONI would howl at him for talking to a Spartan, but he knew he had to find out the truth. He had to know. Had to. So even though he knew that neither Spartan was around, Frank had walked across the mall parking lot to the sloop, and sat down against the forward strut holding under the nose of the craft. The strut itself was nearly as big around as he was, so it made a good lean-to to sit against. And the sloop – about the size of a small apartment building on the exterior – was nice and broad, so it made a dandy shade from the otherwise searing summer sun. Fargo was a little like Eridanus I in that respect – on All Hallows Eve, it was still feeling like an Earth-August.

Until it opened, there was really no telling just where the sloop's hatch was, so he figured he could wait until the Spartans came back and found him before he tried something as rash as going inside.

He dozed off sitting there, unable to tell if the Spartans were planning to run night ops, but even though he felt hungry before he felt tired enough to nod off, he didn't feel it enough to make him move and risk missing their return. He was still there, his chin on his chest, when the duo returned.

Tori pulled out the remote control pad and had keyed open the hatch before she even noticed Flint had stopped walking a few paces back. She turned to look back at him, but paused halfway when she spied the snoozing Marine tucked against the front strut.

"Oh, for goodness sakes." She grumbled, sparing the moment to tuck away the control unit and smear the Brute blood on her breastplate some more. "Those guys will sleep anywhere."

"Yeah." Flint answered, sounding distant. Looking back at her, he gestured at her to make her start walking again, but when she did, he only followed her a few strides before pausing again, and looking back over. "They do that…"

Tori disappeared inside the sloop, likely to spend a little while before returning. Having spent most of her life as a scientist in a sterile environment, she would always wash her armor and oil it down practically between shots fired. Flint found it amusing, but only when she didn't hold up his own progress by insisting on doing his armor, too.

Turning from the entrance, he walked across the distance under the ship to the strut under the nose, where he stopped. Doubtless it was the feeling of a half-ton creature stomping up to him that stirred him, but the Marine raised his head, and turned it to look at Flint's knees before tipping back and meeting his gaze.

Flint watched him get to his feet, aware of every single tender twinge he afforded to his middle. Making no personal move, spare to lift his head to follow the Marine with his eyes, Flint considered asking him what he was doing… but he already knew which one he was looking at. There was that communal thought thing again…

Lifting the bucket helmet from his head, the Marine spared a moment to scratch his grimy scalp with his other hand. Then, helmet at his side, he cocked his head at the Spartan. Flint crossed his arms.

"Hell of a greeting." The Marine mentioned, sourly.

"Greeting?" Flint echoed. "You're snoozing on my ship."

"Sure I am." The Marine answered. "Wanted to talk to you."

Flint wanted to rebuke him, wanted to tell him to go away, but ultimately, couldn't. How would he ever justify that? Defeated, he conceded the point; "I figured." The longer he stood there, though, the more he realized that long foggy memory wasn't as warped as time would have made him believe. The Marine stood about six foot four, roughly a little more than a head shorter than Flint. He had broad shoulders, and big arms – chunky in all the same ways. He wore the same round face, high cheekbones and all. He even had the bright golden blonde buzz cut and the same crinkled blue-silver-gray eyes in his head… if he was a little higher up, and there was a glossy sheen, Flint felt confident he'd be staring at a mirror, and not another man.

And despite the mirrored visor over his own face, he thought he already knew the Marine knew just exactly who he was. "Feel like I know you." He was saying, looking as if he were trying to peek through the visor at Flint's face. "From a long time ago."

Flint inhaled, tasted his lips, and – _what the hell_ – uncrossed his arms. "Frank, then?"

Eyebrows bounced up. "Yeah… that's me… how'd you…?" There remained some doubt, then. Some need to verify, to explore. To be certain beyond a hunch.

Flint reached up, hit the catch seals on the throat of his helmet, and when it was loose, he lifted it off his head, taking it down in front rather than to the side to keep the Marine from freaking out before he had it all the way off. The world looked a little different at dusk without the visor tinting it, and the colors came back sharper, the wind evident against the skin of his face almost before the helmet was even off.

Looking at the Marine – at Frank – all he saw was blatant shock. Now the man also saw that same mirror image that Flint did. Taking a breath, he said, "Hello."

Frank stammered over his own tongue for a moment, before his brows met, and he tried a real word. "Wh…? Fuck…"

Flint half-smirked. "All I said was hello."

"_Flint_?" Frank squeaked, obviously still not over his shock. "It's really you? You're… you…? How did…? Why…? What the _hell_?" Gathering his wits, he added, "You're a _Spartan_?" Of course, there had been the implications, forewarnings, supposition and evidence… but how could it actually be true? Frank blinked twice just to be sure he wasn't seeing things.

"I well imagine that I am." Flint mused, tucking the Mjolnir helmet under an elbow. "What are you?"

Frank burst out laughing, but if it was either his last leg of sanity or merely amusement, it was hard to say. When he got a handle on himself, though, he sufficed with a grin only. Extending a hand, but hesitant to touch, he asked, "I watched you… die…" Morose concern etched abruptly through the grin, staining it with pain.

Flint nodded. "I get that a lot."

"I _felt_ you die, Flint… I knew…"

"I am," Flint pointed out, "allowed to mess up once in a while. I'm still just Human."

Frank finally landed the extended hand on a Mjolnir-clad arm. "I felt you come back."

"That part hurt." Flint admitted.

"You never came home, Flint." Frank said, sounding hoarse. "They said that boy was you, they said you were dead. But I knew. I knew, and I was _right_… you're standing there… you're still alive, Flint. Why didn't you ever come back? Why didn't… you didn't write, or call… I was _looking_ for you." The last came out like a bitter accusation, and it even twisted his grizzled expression.

Flint shook his head. "I work for ONI, Frank. Never going home is part of the job description. They made me a Spartan. I am the forefront of every war, every battle, and I will be until the day I _don't_ come back from the dead."

Frank's face twisted again, this time more so. "You…" his voice failed for a moment, before he cleared his throat out and tried again. Defeat was clear in his voice this time, though, making evident that he'd changed what he was saying mid-sentence. "… got awful tall."

Flint smirked at him, earning an identical one in reply. "We all did."

Frank closed his eyes for a moment, seeming to waver. When Flint reached out to steady him, well knowing he really ought not be on his feet so soon after taking a stomach wound, he toppled directly into the Spartan, leaning his down-tipped head on the Mjolnir armor plating there. At a bit of a loss, Flint rested his free hand on his brother's shoulders.

"I remembered you, Frank."

"I know." Frank mumbled. "Saw you every mirror."

"I imagine I don't have much of a story to tell, do I?" Flint asked. "Seeing as how all you lack are the visual and audio?"

"Not all of the audio." Frank sighed, straightening and lifting his head to look back up. "Every time you got hit, I filled in the blanks for you."

Flint's smirk returned. "I'm sure you did."

"Can I ask, though…? What the _hell_ was April to September of twenty five fifty eight?" Frank asked, sounding as though he had no fond memories of the date mentioned.

Flint frowned, thinking back, trying to place events around the date. Finally, he was about to shrug when he remembered at last – and his brows rose a little before he pulled his mouth out into a thin, flat line. "Oh, that."

"I thought I was going to _die_…" Frank grumbled. "They kept thinking I had this, or that, or the other… but I was clean. I knew it had to be you. What the _hell_ did you get into? Do you _know_ how hard it is to keep a good meal in a body when all you can feel is overwhelming nausea?"

Flint grimaced, but he did half-grin, too. "I, uh… that one's particularly embarrassing…"

"What did you do?" Frank demanded.

"Flood infection… minor… mostly… I lived."

Frank gagged at him, pushing away almost too fast, causing Flint to reach out and catch him again to keep him from dumping himself onto his ass. "_Flood_?"

Flint cast him a concerned look. "Are you sure you want to be getting excited in your condition?" There was an after-sound at the end of the sentence that made Frank wonder if he'd almost added "sir" on the end. Not unusual, but possibly omitted for a reason.

Frank grimaced, before lifting Flint's hand off his shoulder with both of his own. "I'm pretty sure you know just exactly what this momma feels like, so yes. I'm _fine_." The last two words came out through his teeth, though, causing the Spartan to roll his eyes.

"I do believe that I tuned you out because I was trained to tune _me_ out, Frank. You, on the other hand, aren't quite so prepared." Flint told him.

Frank leaned bodily against the sloop's strut, then, and exhaled tiredly. "Flint… what were you doing… when you were… fourteen?"

Flint grimaced. "I'm not going to tell you." He looked away.

"Flint." Frank begged.

He looked back, but shook his head resolutely. "No."

"Why not? What could you possibly be expected to accomplish, at fourteen? You were… _we_ were… just kids. What mission was that one?"

Flint shook his head again, his jaw tightly clenched.

Frank's eyebrows rose just a little. "Okay, hotshot… what about that girlfriend I _know_ you're hiding somewhere?"

Flint groaned, and covered his eyes with a hand. "Good god, Frank."

Frank grinned. "Ha," he said, weakly. "Got you."

.

**November 1, 2559**

For all the attentive silence of the past forty-one years, Frank James O'Neil still couldn't get much out of his long-missing twin. Flint was, he discovered, still Flint, still plucky and sarcastic, but mainly quiet. There were scars, things witnessed, things performed, things lived through. Quite possibly surviving public execution was among them. If anything, the Spartan II was a little more bottled than the six-year-old boy that had left home and never returned.

Eking words out of him took effort, and sometimes Frank just didn't have the strength to try. Whatever bits of the story were not buried under black files in an ONI base somewhere _still_ had a hard time coming out… and though the silence was still more or less an overwhelming factor between them, Frank got the idea that his augmented brother had one or two things he'd kept even from ONI.

Not surprising. That was another aspect of being Flint.

"Where'd you find her?" Frank asked, one arm wrapped around his middle, the fingers of that hand playing with the tendrils of drooling plasmic fluids weeping from his surgical slice. The wound would heal, but it would do so a lot better if he wasn't stubbornly on his feet all the time, yanking on it by trying to use his gut muscles to walk.

"Asteroid laboratory." The pair had found a flattened chunk of crete to sit on at the peak of a heap of rubble, and were looking out over the low end of the city's ragged remains. Towards the farthest end, the occasional blink of brief light suggested there was a firefight happening out there. The distance dulled the sound until it could barely be heard under the harsh, scraping wind.

"They need Spartans for scientist control?" Frank jibed.

"I guess."

Frank sighed. "I spend forty fucking one years looking for your ass and I can't even get three words out of you."

"I've said more than three words, Frank." Flint told him.

"Not in a string." Frank argued.

"You mentioned someone tried to replace me?" Flint offered, apparently in a bid to make peace.

Frank provided a feral grin, but it was more to hide the pained grimace from the twinge sent up from his spike wound. "Yeah, looked just like us."

"Did he tell you what his name was?"

"Frank."

Flint cast him a look, but said nothing to that.

"At first I thought he was just being hard to live with, but when I got him alone that first night, he kept on insisting… as if _I_ wouldn't know which of us I was." Frank grumped. "I had to sit his ass down and tell him how it was before he backed off."

Looking back at the distant hints of battle, Flint said, "He wasn't lying."

Frank cast him a critical look. "What do you mean?"

"When my boots hit dirt on Reach the first time, I was Frank-057. So the flash-clone they replaced me with was, in exchange, also Frank." Flint said. "They wanted you, Frank. Not me."

Frank sat silent for a long time before finally asking, confused, "I don't understand… why did they take you if they didn't want you?"

"Because I lied to them." Flint said, tapping his armored fingers on the Mjolnir plating on his knees. "I told them I was you." He cast his brother a glance, then, meeting his gaze. "You were supposed to be the Spartan."

"Me?" He looked little better than shell shocked… as if that were the last thing he'd expected to hear. "Wh… why? What made me better than you?"

Flint shrugged. "I never asked that one."

Frank whistled. "Wow. That's a hell of a hitter. How come you never tried to come home, Flint?"

The Spartan's face wrinkled. "I was _six_."

"You're _forty-nine_, Flint. More than capable."

"Eridanus I is glass." Flint countered.

"Yeah, well, it wasn't always." Frank stated. "You could have returned before then. You didn't even try, though, did you? Why?"

"You're assuming."

"I'm not wrong." The Master Sergeant stuck a finger up at his twin. "You can't lie about what you were doing, because I was aware of every last twitch, every fistfight, every firefight, everything. I even knew when you crashed your plane."

"Home," Flint answered, softly, "was what I was defending. There was purpose."

"What about me?" Frank begged. "We never did anything separate until that mess happened, and you disappeared."

Flint just shook his head, and set a hand on the helmet he'd perched to his side. "I don't know how to justify it in ways you'd understand, Frank. You're outside the… system. You still value different things."

"Yeah, well." Frank looked back out over the city, pulling his hands down into his lap. It was more to make himself stop messing with his injury than anything else. "So about that shoulder. Was it really bad enough to make you ambidextrous?"

Flint nodded. "Had to, or I couldn't shoot."

"What made you wait so long before you let them fix it?"

He cast Frank a look. "What do you mean? They fixed it as soon as I got back to Human space… November sometime."

Frank shook his head. "I mean when they really _fixed_ it, not when they patched it over for you. Some… what… two? Four months ago?"

"Oh, that." Flint looked away again, then, seeming to brood a little. "That wasn't the UNSC."

"It wasn't?" The comment earned him a look from the Marine, but when he refused to answer right away, Frank pressed. "Well, what did you do? Mine doesn't hurt anymore so yours mustn't, either."

"It's fine." Was all Flint would say.

"You are so very full of secrets, little brother."

"I'm bigger than you, Frank." Flint cast him a wry look.

"I'm older." Frank protested.

"Yeah, by five minutes!"

"Fifteen!"

.

**November 5, 2559**

"I can't see it."

Marines all around lifted their heads, and looked curiously at the Spartan standing in their midst. Of all the things they expected a typical Spartan to say, that wasn't among the imagined dialogue. For one thing, the "_I can't_" sort of stood out.

"What do you mean, you can't see it? He's right there." Frank stuck an arm out, pointing, though after about a thousand yards, the breadth of his fingertip could have swallowed whole city blocks, top to bottom. "Second story, fifth window on the right, second building from the crater."

"Yeah, but the scope… I can't make it… arg." Flint dropped the sniper rifle and tugged on the expensive range-finding scope on the top of the gun. "How does this thing come off?"

"Off?" Frank asked, puzzled. "Hey, stop." He reached over, brushed the Spartan's hand away, and dialed out the clamp screws holding the device to the rifle. Once it was loose, he flipped up the lock switch and lifted the scope off and away. "Like that."

Shouldering the weapon once more, Flint lined up a bead, so the Marine stuck his binocular up to his face and found the target in question. Jackals with beam rifles were difficult, but a Brute holed up with one wearing shielding and being more or less immune to everything they had that was outside the Brute's own gun range was more so.

When Frank had dragged up the high-powered sniper rifle with the plasma-display system scope mounted on the top, it seemed the perfect solution. But the gun was a refitted .60, making the recoil a bit too much for a pack of war-weary Marines that had been hunkered down behind MA5B's for so long. Handing the rifle to Flint had been the next logical step – Frank had never seen anyone hold so very unnaturally still for so long until he'd stood there and watched his brother try to find the target through the scope. This time, though, the Spartan took the shot – and then the second shot directly – almost as soon as he'd gotten his binoculars up to his face.

Through them, he saw the Brute first stagger, then when his shielding popped and died, the second round tore out the back of his head and dropped him like a rock. For the distance, a headshot was a bit beyond remarkable. Frank whistled. "Dead on."

"That was better." Flint mentioned, dropping his aim. "Could see him."

Frank looked up again, past his binoculars. "Something wrong with the scope?"

"Oh, no." Flint mused. He tapped a finger against his domed golden visor. "It's the suit. Older model of scope, doesn't synch well with the Mjolnir subsystems, so I have to jimmy the position and sometimes that doesn't work so well." He shrugged. "Scope's probably just fine."

"So you don't technically see _through_ that visor, then?"

"Well, I do." Flint answered. "If the HUD lost power, I could still see out. It would just be… dark. Probably fuzzy." Tucking the overpowered weapon into an elbow, the Spartan scanned the area downrange with what seemed a nonchalant air.

"Or you could just take your helmet off." Frank offered.

"I could." Flint didn't sound willing, though. "Ties into those subsystems, though."

"So if you took the helmet off, your shields would turn off, too?"

"Yup."

Frank blinked. It was the first non-formal word he'd heard his brother utter yet. The significant lack of _sir_ to anyone at all remained, but conversely, he didn't look inclined to make anyone here call _him_ that. It had the Master Sergeant a little puzzled. "Which would be a bad thing?"

"Yup."

Frank couldn't help it; under his bucket helmet, he grinned from ear to ear. Either his twin was warming up to something naughty, or he was deciding it was okay to be friends with his brother again. "You're not too fond of having your shields turned off, are you?"

"I like my suit." Flint answered, nonplussed. "It does its job."

"I like your suit, too, that doesn't mean I get to have one." Frank countered, jokingly.

That comment, though, made the Spartan look at him. "If you tried to wear this armor, Frank, it would rip you apart." He held out a hand, as if to prove a point, and added, "It's an accelerator suit. The only reason it doesn't tear _me_ up is because I was augmented to handle it."

Frank's expression sobered, and he narrowed one eye. "When you were fourteen."

Flint's posture sagged. "Not talking about that, Frank." He looked back downrange, then, and either did spot something or pretended to, but he didn't immediately raise the scopeless rifle. He looked like he might, though.

"Oh, come on." The Master Sergeant complained, resting his elbows on the concrete hump in front of him. They and some six or eight other Marines had come down to the front edge of a counter-push the Brutes had employed, but anyone trying to get any farther down the street had gotten their brains splattered by the Brute Flint had just serviced. "I already know all there is about it, and even when, so what's the big deal? Just don't you go and get boiled by anything else, understand?"

Flint emitted a sound not unlike a cross between a choke and a hiccup. The gold visor turned back to look at him. "Boiled?"

"That's how it felt." Frank admitted, carefully not looking back.

Flint grunted. "I don't recall… was too out of it to really note what anything specifically resembled at the time." Frank saw him give the slightest of shrugs, but that was all.

"And then you had to go and _get up_… couldn't leave me alone for a second. Think I must have busted Steve's eardrums when you fell over." The Marine grumbled, tucking his binoculars to his face again and roving some uninteresting scenery.

"I didn't fall over."

He looked up, then. "What?"

"I didn't fall over." Flint repeated, now actually sighting down the barrel of his scopeless rifle at something. "I was pushed." Punctuating the elaboration with a shot, he waited for the sound to diminish before adding, "Kelly, think it was… caught me getting up. Tried to stop me. Said it wasn't a good idea."

"Oh?" It was as much voluntary information as Frank had heard yet; he wasn't about to interrupt beyond a prompt.

"Staff came in about that point," he said, aiming again, and this time tracking something over the course of an inch before shooting that, too. "Kelly was all that was holding me up by then, really. Shaking like there was no tomorrow, the both of us. Staff tried to separate us, get us back to our original positions… gave me a push." He lifted the rifle to rest the butt on his hip, the barrel in the air, and then he looked back at Frank. "Over I went."

Frank wasn't sure whether to grin at the terminology, or grimace in sympathy, so he just stood there and stared blankly at the Spartan for what felt a small eternity.

"What?"

"Oh." It was all he could think of to add, though he felt cheap saying it. Some forty years had passed and it seemed neither could think of much to say to the other. It made Frank itch more than anything else.

"Who is Steve, by the way?"

.

**November 9, 2559**

Viktor Magrasse ducked under the crushed doorway, shimmying past the wrinkled, ruined door itself, to drop onto the floor beyond on his knees. He grimaced, having lost his knee guards a while back to excessive damage, and when he stood up again he dusted his legs off of the clinging bits of broken plascrete.

"Smelly apes." He griped, glancing back. Moving forward, he picked his slung MA5B up and began to trot, cutting a shorter path underneath a pair of large, sprawling malls to make it back to the bunker from the ridge. His SRS had been entirely ruined, nearly split in half, by countering a blow from a twin-bladed spike rifle, so he'd left it behind. The ridge had been lost, and he was really the only one up there anymore, so he'd had to abandon his post and come running back or be killed.

Without radios working worth a damn, it was that or make Frank wonder just what had happened up there, and when. And he'd be forced to send more people to get swarmed and killed just trying to find out. It was better this way.

Out the other end of the maintenance tunnel – a more or less straight line that was tall but not broad and had tubing and pipes running the ceiling overhead – Magrasse climbed out over the tangled, burnt-out remains of what had been a car. He couldn't tell if it was a generic econo-box or if it had been sporty anymore, but it still more or less resembled a mangled car, so he knew what it had been. There was one tire, slagged around the bent wheel, but all the rest of the flammable things were gone.

That was the thing about plasma fire… it would ignite anything at all. Even some low-temperature sensitive metals, like aluminum. Watching aluminum burn away was hard on the eyes, but also fascinating. Magrasse had seen enough non-flammable things scorch into vapor though that he'd lost the ability to marvel at it.

Ducking through a hole in the wall of the old hotel across the cratered street, Magrasse turned around the heap of desk crumbles and dropped nimbly out the mortar hole in the other wall. He landed next to another Marine, but the guy was missing some forty percent of his body and had been laying there for a while. The only thing brave enough to come and get him was bugs, so he looked and smelled pretty bad, but what there was of him had not been scattered or pulled apart yet.

Magrasse clamped a hand over his mouth and nose and pressed on, struggling not to breathe what was doubtless a bubble of nauseating air until he was well past the dead guy. There were quite a few fallen, bug-eaten carcasses in the city, but most of them were not Human. The fighting was so brutal, though, that nobody really had any time or gumption to do anything about them.

Past the carcass, Magrass trotted swiftly up the street toward an intersection where the lights had been blasted away. Here, left would take him around the shelled building in front of the main entrance of the bunker, and straight ahead would take him up the road two more blocks to the second entrance. Since both of these had been picked off and shelled shut already, either direction was fine. But when he went ahead and took the corner in favor of a long straight stretch, he ran right into a Brute patrol that ought not be there.

"Mein gott!" Magrasse squeaked, backpedaling fast and ducking back around the corner again just in time to miss a dozen rounds of plasma and six hot twelve-inch spikes. "Ar, for the radio." He grumbled, tucking his back to the corner and checking his assault rifle to be sure he was ready for this.

"Come out, puny Human!" The Brute called, the sound of the patrol's steps drawing closer a little faster than before. "I just want to talk to you."

"Believe that, heh." Magrasse snorted. He jerked his leading elbow around the corner and half his head, sighted down the barrel already. The first target he found was a Grunt. He splattered it with bullets, then swung to the next one and did the same. Neither had been hit bad enough to die, but it gave them hesitance to rush so boldly forward, and that was mainly all Magrasse needed.

"After him, you worthless whelps!" The Brute protested, as Magrasse tore out from the corner and ran back the way he'd come with every ounce of speed he had to give. At the very first next corner, he swung himself blindly around it and tucked against the wall again, willing to take the risk of probable enemy in favor of taking the risk of known enemy. Magrasse wasn't about to test his luck quite that badly yet. And he would need cover if he was going to take down a Brute, four Grunts and two Jackals. By himself.

When he felt the sounds of their footfalls meant they were close enough but not too close, he flung a grenade around the corner without looking, then ducked into his knees and covered his helmet with both hands.

"Grenade!" The Brute called. When the frag went off, Magrasse was up and running again, hitting the alley's dead-stop corner with a boot and bouncing into the side of the building he'd been against earlier. He reached up and caught the decorative brickwork exterior and pulled upwards with holds barely as deep as his fingerprints.

For a heartbeat, his forward momentum gave him enough upwards momentum that he managed to get high enough to grab the lip of the first mortar hole. From there, he swung free of the corner and hooked a boot into the broken crete and glass wall, and tucked into a roll over the lip to freefall onto the other side just as the patrol made it into the alley.

"He's gone into hiding! Find him!" The sound of the Brute's voice was unmistakably agitated. He wasn't going to let Magrasse go that easily, but Magrasse had a few tricks, too. Here, the detritus had piled in slopes against the walls, so he rolled as soon as he hit until he was nearly in the middle of the building. Shaking the dizziness out of his head, Magrasse picked himself up, and checked his gun again.

He reloaded it, glanced at the wall he'd come over, then began to ascend the slope he'd just rolled down from. At the top, he took a fist-sized chunk of the detritus at his feet, bounced it in his hand for a moment, then flung it at an angle to hit and ricochet from the taller wall of the building he'd just come all the way around from.

When it hit the wall at the top and fell down into the street, Magrasse had to cover his mouth to keep from laughing; "Grenade! Fall back!"

He only had one more frag, and he wasn't going to waste it. But there was nothing here he could really use to his advantage… looking back up at the wall's broken top, he wondered if he could pick them off as they came over the wall. But that entirely depended on them climbing it, like he had.

He was about to make a decision based on the location and circumstances of the moment when he heard something affix to the other side of the wall between himself and the patrol. His brows met, then his mind conjured a good possibility for what that might be, and he jumped from the heap of detritus and ran for it. When he got to the other side of the broken building, where the front wall was entirely gone, Magrasse heard the charges detonate… and then the squeals and guttural screams of the Grunts and Jackals as the pile of detritus swallowed the alley. They hadn't counted on the wall holding up so much junk, and they'd paid for it. Turning around, Magrasse aimed his rifle and waited for the dust to clear.

When the first alien mounted the spread pile of settling detritus, the Marine opened fire, hammering the lone Grunt with half the magazine. At that range with an MA5B, it was necessary. The Grunt dropped onto its face, dead and oozing orange blood from a dozen different holes. But behind it came the shielded and better-armored Brute, and he had one of those switch-back bladed grenade launchers at his hip.

"Stupid Human!" The Brute roared, thrusting the weapon forward. Magrasse ducked and ran for it, sideways, to avoid the raining hail of flak and fire as the launched grenades came down around him.

"Fokking hell!" Magrasse found the shelled front of another building, but couldn't get in through the tangle of rebar, so he kept going. Running across the street, he jumped through a smaller hole punched through a glass front, and scrambled through the shattered glass fragments into the open back, the utter lack of a ceiling or upper story floors making it seem a very exposed place indeed. Grenade fire followed him across the street, then broke out the last of the glass front behind him.

"Come back here, Human scum! You cannot win, and you cannot escape! The Chieftain demands it!"

"What? Chieftain? Uh-uh, not me, not today." Magrasse tucked sideways again, shouldering through what had once been a wooden fence rail in the alley he was now in, but was now so burnt that it was just standing charcoal. It shattered around him, and he dropped straightaway into a crater. "Augh!" he tumbled as his footing disappeared, then splashed down in the bottom in the middle of a huge pool of water. "Ew, gross, eh…" But it wasn't sewer. Just a broken water main… it still had nasty crap floating in it, though, and he sloshed through to the other side quickly, trying not to look too closely at any of it.

The Brute came out the back of the building behind him, and blew the water into the air as he scrambled out of it on the other side. Shrapnel tore chunks from the buildings around him, clods of detritus, crete and dirt from the ground, and sent shattering fragments of the broken walls overhead down on him. What had Magrasse worried was that he could feel the shrapnel itself embedding in the armor on his back, too. As he got to the end where it opened up again, he jerked the grenade off his belt and hooked the pin out of the spoon. He spun around and flung it right at the Brute, then ducked through the new opening into the third street over.

He had to get rid of that tail before he got to the bunker door that still worked, or else the alien'd just report where it was and it would get shelled shut too. He paused at the opening, and turned around to face it, rifle first. There was no way he could hope to win a duel against a grenade launcher with just an assault rifle, but he couldn't get any closer to the bunker without doing _something_ about the Brute. They had enough problems without needing to find somewhere else to hide.

The Brute shouldered through the alley up to the hole, and when Magrasse opened fire, the shielding popping outward broke the hole bigger, and showered both of them in collapsing fragments of the otherwise freestanding wall. The Brute roared, forcing his bulky weapon around in the tight quarters, and fired three consecutive rounds straight at Magrasse.

He dropped back, letting them sail over his head, but he kept firing, now from between his knees. When his magazine was empty, he looked up for a split second, having noticed something up there moving, and when the Brute saw his expression change, he too glanced up.

Neither had time to move before the wall crumbled down atop them.


	8. Not An Easy Legend

**8: NOT AN EASY LEGEND**

**November 13, 2559**

Even at two in the morning, the sky burned alight with the fires of atmospheric entry. Dropcraft and Seraph fighters sprayed from the massive whale-shaped ship like falling pieces of shattered sky, but each hooked around forward after coming free for about a half mile. Watching it happen was spectacular, especially since the shields were flickering brightly and the main cannons were discharging as rapidly as the fire from space came down in reply. The ship was making a fast run to insert as many troops as possible before something else blew it up from behind.

Frank was looking up, watching that, when he felt a massive shadow fall over him from behind. He jumped forward, looking behind him, expecting the worst. But when he saw it was only Flint, he relaxed. "Looks like we've got more company." He said.

"That's not a Brute ship." Flint answered.

Frank looked back up. "How can you tell?"

"It's something you get an eye for after a while." Flint answered, simply, looking up, too. "Those are our reinforcements."

"Should I turn the radio back on?"

"I wouldn't bother. Elites don't use our frequencies anyway."

Frank nodded. "Activity on the ridge has multiplied. I think we may have lost Magrasse up there."

"Now we get to take it back, and have a look for ourselves." Flint answered, deadpan. "Or I could just take Tori and clean it out for you. Take about two days."

"I want to see what these new guys do before that happens." Frank answered. "But this isn't the reinforcements I thought we'd be getting."

Flint looked down at him. "I heard they had picked up intel suggesting they had something to protect on this world, Frank. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss them."

Frank turned, then, and looked back at him. "Flint… answer me something."

Flint folded his arms, but said nothing.

"Do the Elites call you Zelisee?"

Flint emitted an amused noise. "Thought you was me, did they?"

"What does it mean, Flint?"

"Indestructible." Flint answered. "It was an honorary title given after Delta Halo, and before the Ark. I was… playing catch-up with John."

Frank's face wrinkled. "Who is John?"

"The Spartan who found the first Halo, and destroyed it. He was hard to catch up to. Found him, though… while back. Sent him home."

"Oh, that guy. Saw him on broadcast once or twice I guess." Frank nodded, looking back up at the Elite ship. It was clearing away from the dropcraft and nosing back up out of the atmosphere. Anti-air from the Brutes encampments was already active, and had blown more than a dozen out of the sky. Thousands more were still descending. "How many exactly are there that call you that, and why does it make them like you so much?"

"I got them in, out, and the job was done." Flint answered. "It was my idea and I was leading their advance, so… I suppose it was their way of saying thanks for not getting them slaughtered. We drew out the Flood so John could chase Truth. Seeing as John actually _caught_ Truth afterwards, it was worth it. They don't look at the world the same way you do, Frank. They considered it the most noble and honorable mission to ever cross their paths. I just so happened to be in the middle of it at the time."

"So why do they call _me_ that?" Frank looked back at him. "You look nothing like me. I'm just a Marine."

Frank looked down, meeting his gaze. "What are you talking about? We're identical, Frank. And if you're talking about the armor… I wasn't wearing Mjolnir to that battle that they named me after."

Frank thought about that for a moment, then looked away, nodding. "Okay. So they'd know your face, then. My face."

"Yes."

Frank studied the way the new arrivals maneuvered in the sky as he contemplated the words his brother had given him; and while he knew Flint was about as immersed in the military lifestyle as anyone could possibly become, he still couldn't put his finger on why he _never_ said 'sir'. To anyone, for any reason. That was very un-militaristic. It was also not something they were liable to have let slide back when everything hadn't fallen apart yet.

"Something else you wanted to add, Frank?" Of course he'd notice. Now he was bothering to pay attention again, that was.

"You're a Spartan, Flint." Frank sighed. "The best and finest the UNSC has to offer… a soldier's soldier."

"But."

"You don't really act like one."

Flint's visor could not have hidden the cat-like smirk even if Frank had been looking. "That's new. Ran with the Elites for a little too long, I guess. Had to teach myself some new tricks."

Frank did look back, then. "Ran with the Elites?"

Flint just nodded.

"Doing what?" Frank pressed.

"Assignments."

Frank shook his head. He still wasn't very talkative, and obviously preferred not to elaborate on a whole lot. Frank wondered if that would ever change. "Well, come on, then. Let's go and greet our reinforcements before they get picked off."

.

**November 16, 2559**

Tauk put his shoulder down, and pushed for all he was worth. When the top of the heap of rubble fell away, it revealed the head and right arm of Gurag and the gloved fingers of one hand on what had to be a Human. They were little, delicate fingers, barely as big around as the wires used to hook up electronics. Tauk prodded at Gurag's head, to see if he lived still, but the other Brute did not stir. He was stiff and motionless, but Tauk wasn't about to prod him enough to learn if his flesh had chilled.

He wasn't here for Gurag anyway.

More carefully, Tauk began to lift away the blocks and sheets of rubble from around where the Human was buried, until he had successfully excavated the diminutive creature completely. He was not a small Human, as Humans went, with sharpened, angular features, and broad shoulders. But he was still less than a third as big as Tauk, and he would be no problem to move.

This creature, Tauk did spare the time to tell if he lived. Though quite out of it at the moment, and more than likely having a couple of broken bones from being landed on so very brutally, the Human lived. Tauk flashed his yellowed fangs in relief. Returning from the conflicts empty handed had made Clan Chieftain Obivok very angry more than once. He was not an ignorant Chieftain, as no Brute ever achieved such a status with such an impairment, so he didn't kill anyone for their failing, but he always made it plain he would give them tough tasks or have them beaten and flayed if they kept failing. He had heard the reports back, had heard the names and seen the files attached.

That despicable demon Zelisee was rumored to be here, and Obivok wanted that demon's head. So if the rumor was truth, the hunt for said demon would begin. And Obivok had also made it painfully clear that no one was to so much as put scratch on the demon Zelisee's armor. The glory of tearing the demon apart would belong to Obivok and none other.

Should he ever be robbed of that glory, he would tear the robber apart instead, and all of the children of said robber, too. None of the potential robbers had much interest in trying it, though – there was really no glory gained by facing down a beast so very out of their league. Zelisee was unlike any Elite ever to walk the battlefields, and not just any Brute could take him down.

Where Zelisee's hooves hit, the blood of his enemies ran freely, and it was effortless for him. All other Elites looked up to him. The last one Obivok had captured had spoken highly of the demon, after all. And while he said he'd seen and fought beside the demon recently, he had not given them any recent locations, and so had died without satisfying Obivok's curiosity. The Chieftain was insane, in Tauk's opinion, but so long as he kept his anger pointed elsewhere, it was a tolerable insanity.

He'd mauled the last female he'd taken, a sure sign. Tauk wasn't capable of challenging the old Brute himself, but he hoped somebody did soon. Somebody who could actually win against him, and replace the deranged zealot.

Still, this Human would prove a good satiation for the Chieftain's rotten mood, surely. He would be pleased with Tauk at least, and then things would perhaps calm down for the clan a bit. Routing the Humans here was hard enough, but if the rumors of the Elites' favored and most revered warrior being among them were true… then the Clan of the Black Paw had bigger problems than a difficult Human infestation. Tauk wasn't looking forward to seeing the demon Zelisee in battle, and he hoped the demon was always occupied elsewhere, with other offensives, whenever Tauk went to fight.

It was a dying hope, really, especially if this Human confirmed any of Obivok's theories. If he confirmed that rumor as truth.

Absently, he flicked some of the dusty bits off the Human's armor, rather lost in thought. He wanted to sit for a moment and wait for his prize to wake up – sometimes people would go down and be alive, but never waken again. And he didn't want to bring a comatose Human before Obivok, because there was no way to question a being whose brain was shut down despite their body still living. Rather pointless, in fact.

Tauk looked back at Gurag, then, and reached back to pluck the dead Brute's weapon out of the rubble, tucked as it was under his hunched form. The entirety of Gurag's patrol was gone, wiped out by this Human. Tauk was glad he didn't have to fight to capture him, too. There was just too much of a risk of damaging the prey beyond repair, and then having them bleed out and die before they could be gotten back to Obivok. Too much, too much.

It was only good to slaughter prey when one's obsessive Chieftain didn't want to _talk_ to them, ugh. Still, when one's Chieftain has a blood-vow against a certain powerful member of the enemy's ranks, information on the whereabouts of said certain member was often desired. And it was easier to just ask the nearest enemy about it than to try to dig through their maze of radio signals hoping to find the right one that happens to mention said individual.

People just didn't often say everything they knew on the radio during battles, after all. Very rare, very rare indeed.

Tauk was still picking at Gurag's bladed grenade launcher when he heard the Human give a start. Looking over, he saw the little alien jerk up onto his elbows, his little eyes wide in terror. He tried to scramble away, but Tauk just put the gun down and dropped a hairy hand around a passing ankle, and stilled the creature. "You are coming with me, Human." He told it, in his roughened, lisp-influenced variation of the Human's language. "Chieftain wants to see you."

"No!" The Human fought against Tauk's hold, pulling hard. Tauk suspected that the only reason he wasn't getting kicked by the other, free leg was likely due to injury to said other, free leg. "Ah soonah _die_ than get fed to yer smelly leader, ya big ape! Let go of me leg!"

Tauk's muzzle wrinkled as he drew the skin over his nose back. This Human spoke almost as funnily as he imagined himself did. How curious! He stood up, lifting the Human by the hold on his ankle, until he'd been lifted right off the ground. The Human wailed a short note, but he dragged a double-fistful of the detritus he'd been on with him when he came up off the ground. This he threw at Tauk's face.

Tauk just blinked and rubbed the dust out of his eyes with his other hand, before blinking at the Human in his grasp. He wasn't fighting back very hard. Maybe that wasn't a good thing… maybe he needed to be quick in getting him back to Obivok, before he did die of some hidden injury. Tauk had known a Brute that had been hammered in the chest too much, and had died of internal complications several hours later, after the fight was well overwith.

"Tsk, tsk, must be on our way, now, little Human. Stop fighting and I will be nice."

"Ye don't know the definition o' the word." The Human gasped, letting himself dangle with his arms over his head for a moment. He closed his eyes afterwards, and just when Tauk feared he'd died suddenly, he reopened them, and shot Tauk the most curious grin he'd ever seen a Human wear.

"What…?" he started, only to be stopped shy of the rest of his sentence when his bronchial tubes were cut, and he saw the brilliantly glowing tips of a twin-bladed energy sword shoot out through his chest. Tauk's expression jerked into shock and denial, horrified that he had come so very close to a moment of glory before his Chieftain only to be slain at the doorstep of the moment. There was no pain, only the swelling, consuming wave of blackness that swallowed his eyes as he felt himself falling.

That fall didn't end at the ground, the blurry shape of a decloaking Elite standing behind him and the dropped Human growing smaller and smaller as silence enveloped the scene.

When the Brute's face had finished relaxing, and all the light was finally gone from his eyes, the Elite raised his long head, and focused on the Human spilled in the rubble alongside it. "And what have you to say for yourself, Human?"

Magrasse inhaled, with effort, and answered, "Ah know where Zelisee is."

The Elite stooped, and lifted him up. "Then that is where we are going next."

.

**November 17, 2559**

Flint was out in front, and Tori was off to the left, the Spartans having a rare solo day to themselves. Since their arrival, this was the first time Frank had noticed them not working in some form of tandem. Maybe there had been a change in plans, or maybe he just hadn't seen this was the original all along, but Frank didn't think too much of it. They were just as effective… although he could have sworn the woman looked pissed as hell.

Flint certainly seemed… agitated… more so than he usually was when being shot at. Frank and his Marines were taking the middle out of the advance, though he thought for sure they were cheating by using the two Spartans as a ready distraction. It was certainly difficult for the Brutes and their minions to decide whom to concentrate on – the Spartan on the left, the Spartan on the right, or the fifty some-odd Marines all working in a clump down the middle?

As a result, they became easy pickings. Every time Frank thought the enemy was about to get its act together, one or the other Spartan would appear down a side street, and blow that elbow off the enemy's offensive, then disappear again and leave them disoriented and unsure what to do next.

Frank had only lost one man… and only two others had needed to be dragged back for medical attention. With their perimeter growing each time they met the Brutes, it was easy to feel optimistic about the fighting on Fargo in general. But then Frank would think about the other Human bases, and wonder if they were doing half as well.

He was ducked back down, reloading, when he looked up, past all of his men, and saw an Elite go sprinting across the street several blocks away, headed for the bunker. Frank rocked forward. "Miller, Hansen, you hold this line – I need to go check something out. This won't take me five minutes. Pace those Spartans, you hear me?"

"Yes, sir!" Only Miller got a chance to respond, but it was good enough. Under their cover fire, Frank got up and ran back the way they had come, darting quick after that Elite. He'd been carrying something, something smaller than himself, something that looked familiar.

Frank didn't catch up until the Elite stopped at the half-hidden bunker doorway, needing a moment to figure out where it was before going inside, but the problem was solved for him when three guarding Marines stepped out of it. They had their guns pointed at him at first, but quickly dropped their aim and slung their guns over their shoulders to take the Elite's package from him.

By the time Frank made the gap, the Marines had taken it away inside the bunker. Hearing Frank approaching, the Elite turned halfway to see, but gave a start and straightened up when he saw Frank. "Zelis… you… er… are smaller than I remember."

Frank actually laughed at the poor alien. "I'm not Zelisee." He looked past the Elite, into the bunker, but the entrance corridor was empty. "What was that you had?"

"Not…? But you're… that was one of your warriors. I found him in the mangled structures at the base of a natural ridgeline where I entered the city." The Elite looked puzzled, though. He cocked his long head to one side, and clicked his mandibles together. "You say you are not Zelis…"

Frank met his gaze, then. "You'd be wanting my brother." Frank told him. "He looks like me."

The alien's expression pinched into an unmistakably confused look. "Human bloodkin have no differentiated features?"

Frank grinned. "Sure we do. Just not Flint and I. What are you looking for him for?"

"All the warriors with me were killed in the crash when our Phantom was shot down. I thought if I could find Zelis… he would know where the others were."

"He doesn't." Frank answered. "But we're cutting a path through their forces to get at one of your landing zones and we've been hearing Elites screaming insults for the last hour, so we're close. Want to come?"

The Elite lifted a plasma rifle off the armor on his leg. "Certainly… any bloodkin of the mighty Zelis is welcome to lead myself in an honorable battle for the preservation of fellow warriors."

Frank rolled his eyes, but he turned around and with a final, "This way," he took off at a sprint again, hoping the "human", as he'd been called, that the Elite had brought in would be okay. He certainly stood better odds now than he had by being out near the ridgeline east of the city. That was all Brute territory now.

Which probably explained why he was being carried.

Frank made the first corner he needed to turn when he felt Flint go through a wall backwards, and it unbalanced him, sending him sprawling to his knees. "Ugh!"

"Forerunners! What was that?" The Elite exclaimed, picking him up in his stumbling efforts not to run Frank under as he stopped himself. Setting Frank back on his feet, the Elite gave him a puzzled look. "Do your feet often fail you?"

"That wasn't me…" Frank said through gritted teeth, starting to run. "Flint's in trouble!"

Getting back up to the line behind the Marines was simple enough, though with the larger frame of the Elite shadowing his advance, it was harder not to get spotted and shot at a bit on his way in. As soon as Frank hit the tumbled storefront, he grabbed the nearest Marine to him and yanked him down, sending a few bullets skyward when the man's rifle bonked off the top of the heap.

"Gah! Sarge! What the hell?" The Marine demanded.

"Where are the Spartans?" Frank shot back, unsympathetic.

"One's out left and the other just dropped a building on himself, why?" The man answered, taking the opportunity to reload his rifle since he wasn't firing it.

"Where's the one under the building?" Frank asked.

When the Marine pointed, Frank let go of him and twisted around to see. Glancing past the edge of the heap of rubble, he slapped one hand on his helmet and ducked his head when several spikes zipped past his exposed noggin. He could see the enormous dust cloud, though, drifting as it was into the street and obscuring the Brutes. Some were trying to advance, others were backing up, and most of the Grunts had taken cover and weren't coming out.

"I do not pretend to understand how you knew about this without being informed first, _erihan-zelis_, but you have good instinct. What is the plan?" The Elite asked, from nearly across the street.

"I need to find out if he needs any assistance first, then we're gonna push these hairy bastards back far enough to dig him out." Frank answered.

"Sir, with all due respect, this is a choke point." The Marine behind Frank put in. "Unless that other Spartan opens up the choke, we'll be fighting over this spot for a couple more weeks."

"That's not good enough, dammit! Flint's under that rubble and I have no idea what put him there!"

"That'd be the big fucker with the hammer, sir."

"…hammer?"

"Clan Chieftains carry them, _erihan-zelis_. Something has brought this dispatch's leader out to battle. Either one of you has marked him and made him angry, or else there is something beyond this point he does not wish you to own." The Elite put in.

Frank growled under his breath. "My name is _Frank_, call me that, okay?"

The Elite just raised a hand, then looked away, as if suddenly more interested in looking for a likely target to shoot at. Frank was grateful for that.

"Fine, I'll take an infiltration team and go high. Where is Miller?"

"On your left, sir." The Marine next to him answered. "You sure you want to go yourself, sir? This is how Measom got wasted."

"That's my brother out there!" Frank snapped. "I'm going after him even if you miserable sissies won't!" Getting to a knee, Frank waited for a brief lull in the shooting, then jumped for it, running hunched over across the street to the next forward piece of cover. There, he crouched down beside Miller, and another guy who had his back turned. Miller cast Frank an expectant look, as if suspecting what all that shouting had been about.

"Sir?"

"One of our Spartans just got buried." Frank answered.

"Yes, sir, saw it happen. I know. The big fucker with the hammer thing punted him into the last load-bearing wall, and it made the whole thing come down." Miller answered. "Abraham and Doyle went up Parker Street looking for a way to make a hook and see if we couldn't drive the Brutes back far enough to get a digger team in, but that hammer dude isn't giving us a lot of elbow room. He looks pissed."

"Call back the other Spartan yet?" Frank asked. That was more information than last time. So Flint had taken a _hammer_ to the guts? No wonder he'd gone through the wall backwards!

"No, sir, can't reach her. She's out of shouting range and the radio hasn't changed much, sir. Have a plan?"

"No, but I still liked your original theory. We need to get him unburied so he can do some good." Frank said. He extended a foot to the edge of his cover – part of a shipping crate and some bits of building – and leaned his weight in that direction to peer around the edge of it, to see what was happening. Right as he did so, he saw what looked like an explosion shred through the dust cloud, and several of the half-obscured Brutes dropped in their tracks from the blast. All had colorful things to say about it, but only a few turned around to see what it had been. "What the hell…?"

"Sir?" Miller asked. "What was that blast? Who did that, them or us?"

"I have no idea… but I don't like it." Frank answered. He would have said more, but then he saw something he hadn't seen in at least seven years; the wavering ghost of a cloaked Elite charging past him from behind. Instinct reacted for him, and he jerked back behind cover, his eyes wide and his heart pounding. The last time an Elite had failed to spot him like that had not gone well, but it still took him a moment to realize the Elite hadn't been after him, and had probably seen him there anyway.

"Sir? You okay?" Miller asked, patting the top of his helmet to get his attention.

"Yeah." Frank waved the hand away. "Yeah… I'm…" he bent over and peered out of cover again, curious to know what the Elite thought he was up to. He didn't see anything. "Is there – " the question went unfinished when he heard the distinctive displacement discharge of the hammer striking again, a Brute's arrogant roar of challenge, then a green suit of powered armor landed hard in the middle of the street and promptly slid for the next forty feet before stopping. "Flint!"

The Spartan rolled onto an elbow, shook his head as if dazed, then pushed back to his feet. He didn't have time to get any kind of gun in hand before the massive form of the Brute came charging out of the roiling dust after him, hammer poised for another hit.

"What is going on out there?" Frank wondered, fairly certain the alien had something _personal_ in particular against the Spartan he was after. A split second later, a damning thought occurred to him, and he yelled back, "Everyone concentrate your fire on the hammer!"

The majority of the bullets swarmed the beast before he could reach Flint, but when the rounds pushed him back by hammering on his shields, it unbalanced his forward momentum and made him stagger in place. In the middle of the hail, Flint lurched forward and slammed a fist into the Brute's face, blowing out his shields with the one strike. In a blur of following motions, he first slammed the Brute back, then stole his hammer away and sent it to the side in a dismissed spin. Weaponless at first, the Brute punched back, but while it did move Flint, he didn't seem to really feel it.

Finally, at risk of toppling in defeat, the Brute brought up what was obviously a war-taken trophy, and he lit the hot sword between himself and the Spartan in time to miss having his muzzle grabbed. Flint's own shields saved him his arms, but then that was it, for his, too. He dodged the first blind swing, but rather than assaulting again, the Brute backed off, flung a plasma grenade point-blank into Flint's visor, then turned tail and ran flat out away.

Flint jerked back in alarm, but the grenade stopped in mid-air about six inches away from his face. He kept backing up, even as the thing reversed and followed the retreating Brutes into the dust, but when it exploded, the Elite faded into view at the grenade's pivot point.

"That was the damndest thing I ever saw, Sarge." Miller exclaimed.

"Me, too." Frank agreed. "I think the Brutes just _gave_ us this intersection…"

"Yeah, but I got questions, sir." Miller pointed out. "I don't like this."

"Nobody does… stay on your guard, I'm going forward to find out whatever I can. And try not to shoot the Elite… overmuch."

Miller shot him a half disapproving, half amused smile, but that was mainly how Frank felt about the splitchinned aliens himself, and it didn't bother him much. Standing up, he moved out of cover, tentatively at first, but then when nobody shot at him, he stepped into a trot to meet up with the Spartan and the Elite. Neither of those two were under fire, so it was reasonable to assume the Brutes were pulling out.

Why remained to be seen, though, and it had a haunting feel. Reaching the duo in the middle of the street, Frank saw Flint flex a bit, and wondered if he were trying to ease the ache in his new bruise.

"What was that?" Frank asked.

"That was most curious, agreed." The Elite put in. "Have you met with this clan in battle before now?"

"That was Obivok, and yeah, he hates me." Flint answered, deadpan. "Stole something of his once."

"What did you steal?" Frank asked.

"Taramee's newborn. Wanted to eat it."

The Elite bristled visibly.

"Er…" Frank suddenly wanted to be far, far away from that guy. "So he's got a personal something against you?"

"Said he heard I was here. Said he was going to make a trophy out of my head. Hang it somewhere." Flint looked at his hands, and curled one into a fist. "Think I lost my gun."

"I can get you another probably just exactly like it." Frank offered, though he wasn't really thinking about that part.

"I doubt it, it was an upgrade." Flint responded, looking at him. "Tori still two blocks over?"

"Yeah." Frank let go of his rifle with his supporting hand, and let it hang at his side. "So if he wanted to… why'd they run?"

"Spineless cowards." The Elite growled.

"Because he was losing." Flint answered. "He thought he was big enough to take me down and he was wrong, so he fled before he could lose."

"I've heard of Brutes taking you guys down." Frank put in, quietly. "Guy survived it, somehow, but… it wasn't pretty. You looked like you were punching on a jellyfish, hitting that guy. Did you get into something I don't know about, Flint?"

All he got in reply to that was a look through a glossy golden visor, expressionless and cold.

"Come on, we're pulling back." Frank sighed. "Our new friend here brought someone in, I want to know who it was." Still shaking his head, he turned and walked back to the rest of the Marines.

"He claims your blood, Zelisee. It is good to see you again." The Elite mentioned.

"Practically _is_ me, Vy'atree." Flint answered, quietly. Watching Frank walk back, he seemed more pensive than agitated. "Let's go get your friends out of that crashed dropship. Frank seems to want to call it a day."

"You defer to his judgment?" Vy'atree asked.

"This is his command, Vy'atree. Of course I defer to his judgment." Flint answered, casting the Elite a look. Without more words, he stepped past the alien, heading into the dust cloud after the Brutes. Just another block up, the downed craft lay propped up in the remains of yet another building, blowing hot, black smoke. Any of the survivors would be hunkered around its base, unwilling to step out and be shredded.

Vy'atree watched as Flint walked towards it, with only his sidearm, several clips of ammo for a rifle he nolonger had, and a couple of grenades to go with. Humans confounded him, but he'd thought for a moment he actually understood that one… now, though, he knew better.

.

**November 18, 2559**

"Satriani." Getting back to base with better than ten Elites in tow had been interesting. Few of his men really liked the aliens much, and fewer still wanted any of them to be hunkered down nearby. Their xenophobic behavior was understandable, and it helped that the Elites found a place off to one side and stood in a clump, failing to bother anyone.

The medic looked up, pausing to rub his thumbs in his eyes as he squinted past his sleeplessness to see who was attached to the voice calling his name. "Oh, Sarge. It's you. Hi there. Good hunting?"

"For now." Frank answered. "Who'd we get? Splitlip brought a man in last night."

"Oh, that. Magrasse. I got him stabilized, but he doesn't look too good. Tough son of a bitch hasn't even passed out yet. Want to see him, he's over there." Satriani pointed down the line of wounded Marines, though which one he was really indicating was up for debate. At that angle, all the men looked the same. Most still had most of their gear on, too.

Frank walked the line of boots until he saw the face he recognized, and stopped, noting his gaze was met. "Was about to write you off, there, Viktor."

Magrasse's face wrinkled. "Ye still can't say it right, suh. Maybe ye just give it up, eh?"

Frank smiled. "How's it look?"

"On the ridge, or in me guts, suh?"

"Either."

"Ridge was taken. Had to run fer it. Figured be better than dyin' there, let ya send men to die atop me trying to find out what happened." He gave a partial shrug. "Me guts… didn't see 'em. Doc says I might live, but he didn't say it like he meant it."

"You will… you've survived this long. Got to be something in there other than sinew holding your ass together." Frank assured him.

Magrasse smiled back. "When ye put it that way, suh…"

"Clan Chieftain came down today. Played punt-ball with one of our Spartans." Frank mentioned.

"Hey." Magrasse said, starting to push with an elbow. He never did get sat up, so eventually he quit trying and just laid there. "Brute what got me ass said that his boss wanted to talk to me. Din' say why. Me guess be they hurting for intel. Or want something."

"Want something." Frank sighed. "Chief Petty Officer Flint. Got a bit of a history going."

"Ehh." Magrasse growled. "Ye smart ye don't pick fights with Spartans."

"Evidently, this guy isn't the smart kind." Frank answered.

.

**November 18, 2559**

Tori stepped over the crumbled edge of what had once been a full-height wall, and settled balanced again on the other side. They had approached a bit of town where the highrises had been flattened into roughly mounded heaps, with only the occasional bit of rebar or structural steel poking into the air. Not that there was no cover, per se, but just that it was all so blockily arranged that there may as well not have been. Just stepping up onto one brick, Tori could see most of the first heap, and a large portion of three others, as well as the narrow low spot snaking between them all. Stepping down, she couldn't see much beyond the rising edges of the heaps to either side of her.

And the same was true for all the Jackals bounding along on the far side of the shelled area like a bunch of happy chickens. Chickens didn't carry beam rifles, though, and they also didn't tend to get a measure of sadistic glee out of shredding Human heads at long ranges, either. So far, Tori had managed to keep hers, but only at the repeated expense of her shields, and once, because she'd ducked just in time to be missed.

Whichever of the Jackals – if it wasn't all of them – was shooting at her, she rather imagined them getting quite peeved by now. She wasn't carrying the MA in her arms anymore, mainly because it was out of ammunition, but while she wistfully dreamed how nice it would be to have picked up the SPNKr earlier that day, she knew that a rocket was somewhat overkill for a scrawny little anthropomorphic bird. However, she did have more than just a magnum at her side – unlike Flint, Tori didn't really trust her battlefield skills nearly so much, so she tended to lean towards the use of weaponry that kept her from getting too close to the action.

Which was entirely why she raised the SRS when next a target presented itself. Barely had she gotten the barrel up than the birdbrained Jackal did the same; so Tori dumped herself onto her own ass, and tucked a leg around in front of her for bracing as she sought the alien in her sights.

As predicted, the first round zipped by overhead – a hasty correction that hadn't been enough sent it past at what had used to be waist-height. That was still not far enough down to make any kind of impact on her much-shortened profile. Finding the Jackal as he lined up his next shot, she put a round downrange, and put him out of his birdbrained misery. Still, from somewhere as-yet undetermined, a beam rifle shot came over and nocked her shoulder for her, punting her shielding entirely out of working order and sent lines of crawling static charge snaking over her combat skin.

"Dammit!" Tori groused, back-tracing the beam-rifle's bullet and aiming there with the SRS to see where the shooter was.

"_Toreee!_" The Marines called her that – mainly because neither she nor Flint had mentioned what her rank was. Which was more than likely good – it hadn't changed since she was fifteen, and XO for her Spartan fireteam.

"Huh?" Her head came up away from the sights on the gun and had partly turned, and so was out of the way by about a quarter of an inch when the next self-depleting round sizzled past her helmet. The punishing shudder of displaced air put cramps in her neck, though, and reminded her she'd let herself get distracted while lining up a shot on a bird that knew where she was. "Argh." Quickly she found the idiot, but her responding shot also missed, and the Jackal's ducking jump sent it tumbling downwards a ways, and out of the line of sight. "Oh the hell well." She slung the rifle, pushed to her feet, and twisted to see who had called her. Loudly she answered, "What?"

A Marine darted around the bend in the snaking, gravelly pathway that had at one point been much wider, and better known as Traction Avenue. Now it was just that – a snaking gravelly path flanked on all sides by heaps of disarranged rubble. Huffing and puffing, the Marine drew up several yards shy of her position, waving at her to come hither. "We got a problem, ma'am, we need your help with it."

"What problem?" Tori asked, noting that this Marine was not one of the dozen or so flanking her position in the same way that a similar dozen or so went behind Flint, while all the rest followed Frank up the middle of their cut. Must be a problem elsewhere in the formation, then.

"Chief got buried, and there's a big fucker with a hammer punching the hell out of the front lines." The Marine answered, starting to get his wind back. Sarge'd like you to pull him out for us."

"Buried?" Tori echoed, confused. When the Marine didn't wait to turn and start back, she moved into a swift trot to follow him. "What do you mean by buried?"

"As in a whole building came down on top of him, ma'am." The fellow answered. "It may take him some time we don't have to get unburied again."

"When was this?" Tori asked, thoughtfully.

"Uh…" The Marine paused to look at his mission clock on the display in his helmet, at that point, and swore softly. "Ten hours ago. Took me a long damn time to find you, ma'am. You shouldn't get so far out ahead of us that we can't reach you anymore. Shit like this always waits to happen until times like that."

Tori smiled grimly. "Serves the bastard right."

"… ma'am?"

"Never mind, not important. I don't hear any shooting from center-point…"

Emerging from the side street connecting them to the scene of the incident described, the Marine and the Spartan stood a moment to take it all in. One building in the middle of a string of shelled out but otherwise standing structures had collapsed, spreading rubble and junk across the street – the dust rising from the stirred collapse had mainly blown upwards and to the north, clearing the immediate area for visibility. There were no immediate signs of Marines, Brutes, or anything else, for that matter.

"Uh." Was all the Marine could think to say.

"I think that whatever happened here, we're too late to have any chance at participating." Tori informed him, bluntly. She planted her hands firmly on her hips when he turned to look back and up at her. "Next time, run faster, or don't bother."

Disappointed or cowed, she couldn't tell, but he looked down and mumbled, "yes ma'am" anyway.

"I need reloads anyway. I'm cutting back for a resupply, then I'll probe the area north and east of here." Tori decided.

He looked up again. "You're just gonna keep going, ma'am? You been out here for nearly twenty-six hours."

"Yeah, that's why I'm out of ammunition." Tori informed him. "And why I'm going back to get a reload on the essentials before I push on."

The Marine shrugged. "Okay, but don't say I didn't tell you it was a bad idea."

Tori cocked her head.

"They say you Spartan types are monsters in combat, but… you guys started out Human, iffen you still aren't. That means you have to sleep some time, right?" The Marine reasoned. "You drop in the field, ma'am… with all due respect, your ass is too heavy for me to haul you out."

She laughed. "Understood."


	9. Catching Up

**9: CATCHING UP**

November 20, 2559

When Frank looked up next, it was to see Johns stepping into the bunker and beelining straight for him. "Sarge, sir. Hey. What's going on? Both the Spartans just pulled out."

"Why?" Frank asked.

"I don't know… the dude went first, then that girl followed him about an hour later. When I followed her to see why, I got to hear part of a very interesting argument. Is there something fuzzy in the line of command, Sarge?"

"Not that I'm aware of, but I do know the two Spartans don't really get along all that well. Flint said something about how she didn't used to be that way, but she is now."

"F… okay, sir… still not too sure about this." Johns ran a hand over his head, the hair on it too filthy to be called brown anymore and too long for regulations. There wasn't exactly a shower or a shaving kit to be had, though, as their bunker was a field expedient and hadn't been stocked for military use, as well as being a fallback point nobody had envisioned actually using. Frank looked much the same – only his eyebrows really seemed blonde anymore, and that because he kept sweating them clean and then mopping the sweat off. "I did get word in from the guys sitting on the outer edge of our last push, sir… so far it's clear, but they keep thinking they're seeing something going on and can't tell what it is."

"At a guess, what'd it be?" Frank asked.

"Random infantry movements?" Johns guessed, shrugging. "They weren't carrying anything to suggest they were moving in a secret artillery piece, but on that topic, the scout team we sent west of the ridgeline hasn't come back and someone from that direction mentioned they'd been hearing pounding sounds… like shelling. Sir, I do have a feeling in my gut about all this silence…"

"Which would be?"

Johns inhaled. "Well… a very bad, foreboding feeling, sir… like we're about to get the shit-eating snot pounded right out of us."

"Yeah, that's the same feeling I have." Frank admitted. "But with intel so damn spotty, I can't even have reliable feelers."

"Sir, why are the Spartans sitting on that sloop they came in on, and not out there doing something useful?"

"Because their command is unclear and their morale is shit." Frank sighed. "And because that's just one among many random things they do from time to time that they don't explain to me."

Johns put his hands up. "Fair enough, Sarge… I didn't mean to bitch."

Frank folded his arms over his chest, watching past Johns as a pair of other Marines ducked into the bunker, and one of the Elites walked past the door on the outside. "I'm starting to dislike this whole damn planet."

"Sir?" Johns asked.

Abruptly changing tack – more for his own sanity than for any pretense of solid command for Johns' sake – Frank asked, "How much ammunition do we have, and how much of that can the men carry?"

"… not a whole lot, and all of it, sir." Johns answered. "Enough to keep us in the fray for about six hours. And then we all die. Spectacularly."

Frank's eyebrows rose. "Spectacularly?"

"Well, sir, theoretically, if we ran at the enemy with our guns blazing for six hours, we'd have dug ourselves quite a deep trench through their front line. And, theoretically, when our ammo ran dry, we'd be too far in for any reasonable withdrawal, and the enemy could just close our entrance path behind us, pin us in, and shoot us all to hell while we sat there prettily without any ammo."

Frank smiled grimly. "I see. But that's not the plan, Johns… I have decided that this bunker is, as of now, a death trap, and I will not sit here waiting for it to be sprung. We lost too many exits, too much breadth, and now it's just a rat hole waiting for the rat to move in. I want you to get the men picked up, packed up, and ready to roll in… ah, hell, give them an hour."

Johns looked confused at first, then shook his head okay, bobbing his dirty eyebrows once, and said, "Okay… sir. Works for me, I guess." Then he turned and walked away, to go and spread the new orders around.

Frank blew a sigh as he watched him go – it wasn't the best on-the-spot thing he'd thought up in his career, but at least it would give the men something to do besides bitch and moan about the damn Spartans. It would also alleviate some of the itch felt about having been shelled on a few times already.

And speaking of Spartans…

.

November 20, 2559

While the men situated and oriented for moving out, Frank made the walk through the broken city in what he hoped was the right direction to take him back to that sloop. It was too bad it was such a small bird – even as pounded to shit as they were, he still had too many men to fit all of them aboard her and fly them out.

Not that the UNSC would really be very happy if he did that. They wanted the New Covenant's presence here broken and sent packing. A full retreat of all UNSC personnel would not make that happen. Still, he was tired of being hammered into hamburger, tired of losing men, tired of sending them out to fight without enough supplies to make it worth the effort.

Sigh.

He only got partway when he spotted the first of the pair of giant green Mjolnir suits approaching, breaking the already broken concrete under their armored boots. If it hadn't been already broken, though, it would have held well enough. They still designed civilian roadways to hold up main battle tanks, after all… and that's all the Mjolnir system was. A two-legged, walking tank.

The Spartans wore them like they were, anyway. Frank drew up to a stop, and stood there, waiting for the duo to get close enough to speak with. They were not exactly walking _together_, even in any kind of tactical sense, though, which he noted duly and filed away for later asking. Just as he expected, Tori kept right on going when Flint stopped, looking down at Frank, and she left the two of them behind in under a minute.

"Problem I should know about?" Frank asked, casually.

"Is that question from a superior officer, or from my brother?" Flint countered.

"Whichever will grant me an answer, Flint. Because your issues are unsettling my men, and morale is the _last_ place I need a punch in the guts." Frank answered. "I suggest that whatever problem there is, be dealt with and gotten rid of. We don't need you two quibbling like children all the time."

"We're not quibbling. Tori's just cranky. I'm not even sure why." Flint answered. "Maybe she's out of chocolate again and is in withdrawal. I don't know."

"Ack." Frank grumbled. "Listen, I'm packing it up. We're moving house to somewhere less well-known by the enemy, and I don't feel like sending a runner back behind us to tell you as much. Go do your thing wherever you feel is most tactically sound to do so, I guess. I don't know how to divvy up Spartan firepower anyway. Never had a mechanized unit to play with. But the men I'm moving up to higher ground."

"Understood… makes sense. We'll more than likely follow you, make fingers of empty ground at your flanks or something. Tori's hard to direct when she's _not_ irritable. Getting her to do something besides take it out on them instead of me is harder still."

Frank sighed. "Flint… look… I don't know what the hell is going on between you two, but it has to stop. This is the battlefront, this is where it's all blood and guts and glory. You have to put your personal issues aside and act like soldiers."

"Tori is not a soldier, as odd as that may sound." Flint excused. "I've tried to turn her into one… back… into one. But I'm not qualified for that kind of thing, and it shows."

"She what?" Frank asked, startled.

"She spent the last thirty or so years on a science asteroid, as I mentioned before. By the time I showed up, she'd forgotten how to be a soldier. She still isn't one… she just wears the armor, shoots the gun, and the rest is her bad mood."

Frank sighed. "Great. Just great."

"Ah, so we do still think alike." Flint decided, sounding like he was grinning while he said it.

That, in as much as Frank did not want to laugh right then, made him laugh anyway. "You'll always be my twin brother, Flint, even to your dying day."

"Small comfort." Flint told him, gesturing past him. Frank turned, and together they made their way back to the evacuating bunker site. Tori was already there when they arrived, and the Elites had gathered out the south entrance to wait for the humans to move out. At first only one called a greeting to Flint when he appeared and was within shouting range, but at the proclamation of identity, all the other splitlips chorused an agreeing wort.

"They always do that?"

"Thought I explained this already." Flint muttered.

"That would annoy me royally." Frank put in.

"You think I don't feel the same way?"

.

November 20, 2559

It was dark when the Marines moved out, but that had been one half of why Frank had given them an hour to get ready. The better their chances of moving somewhere discreet, the better their chances of digging in there without getting shelled right back out of it.

And the whole point in shifting bases of operations in the sector was because Frank was sick of being shelled. They moved in groups of three, almost a third of the trios being composed of one wounded slung between two ambulatory. But they moved quiet, and they moved fast, and all eyes roved endlessly, taking in all the lengthening shadows and deepening moonlit stripes between the broken buildings.

By some measure of mercy, the Elites fanned out one by one to scout through the flanks and push ahead to lead over opened grounds. The two Spartans stayed at the rear, one on the far right, one at the far left, though even they were quiet and seemed reserved. This was all recon and scouting, and if even one of them knocked a loose brick aside or fired a single round, the game would be up and their movement would be entirely moot. They had their wounded out in the open, many of their solid troops occupied with said individuals, and unable to fight too. It would be a very bad time to get caught.

Making up the final team – and lacking a force equally divisible by three, there was one of the splitlips trailing him and his Marine – Frank felt a flickering sense of hope that he'd make this in-field adjustment successfully, and he'd have half a chance in hell's fire of making the campaign worth all the lives it had claimed.

The point of war, an old-Earth officer had once said, was not to die for one's cause, after all. The point was to make one's enemy die for his.

Frank wished there were more details embedded in that sage bit of advice. Like how, exactly, one made Brutes die for their causes, however diverse or irrelevant those might be, when all one had was a raggedy group of two hundred and twelve men, and forty two splitlips with a pair of unruly and unfocused Spartan-II's tacked onto the end. Seventy groups of three forged ahead through the dark of night, none daring use a flashlight to give away their parade, and then there was Frank in the back, and Lance Corporal Dimitri just ahead of the trailing Elite that somehow thought he'd be welcome that close.

It tore at Frank's nerves, having the two-meter alien slinking along at his six, pretending for all the world to be one of the division, one of the men, a part of his team. Elites had been butchering Humans for far too long for that to be an easy integration; but so long as his brother was around, Frank had the distinct feeling that not a single splitlip would forget his manners.

There was something Flint had done, something they had seen, something that gave him a place among them, a position of honor. They revered him like a hero; almost in the same manner that the Marines did, though that little detail was generally applied to all Spartans, and not for any witness of any particular deed. But the Elites respected Flint, not Tori, and certainly no one else. They knew him, or thought they did, and treated him as such. It was as if to them, he was a splitchin just like them.

He was a rather unique bridge between the two forces, but he would likely stay that way; while capable of working together, the Marines kept their distance from the Elites and the Elites stayed apart from the Marines when not out hunting for trouble. Having their superior clout out at the perimeter of his troops helped to ease some of the tension of the movement, but only slightly. Better the demon you know, right? An added plus was that there would be, could be, no betrayal of interests. It was fully understood that Brutes and Elites hated each other in ways that no Human intervention could ever match. Elites had killed Humans because they were told to.

Brutes killed Humans because they were told to – and they looked tasty when seared a bit at the edges. But Brutes and Elites set at one another like savage animals, rabid and frothy, even when told _not_ to. That hate, from wherever it had originated, was very, very old, and much more deeply rooted.

And for all the butchery that had been between Humanity and the Elites, it was a paltry sum compared. That was obvious – they could forgive, forget for a moment, and pursue a common goal. Not so for the Brutes. Not so, not ever.

The men moved fast and low, covering more than eight miles even under their dragging loads before midnight. Finally, though, a stop had to be called. The forward Elites had begun to double back, and the procession of Marines was snaking back and forth so much it was almost doubled upon itself as well. They had found the flanking positions of the enemy along that edge of the city limits, and there was no stealthy way through that garrison. There, though, the underground tramway opened to the surface, and those appeared concealed and empty. Six of the forward Elites closed in, three went down, and an agonizing twenty minutes later, returned to claim it was clear.

For now.

Frank had caught up to the forward edge by that point, keeping the men spread out and lying low just in case of accidental hiccup, but with the word of an open spot to disappear into before dawn dared peek, and also word that an enemy patrol was inbound, he quickly shuffled the Marines down the stair into the dusty tramway station.

The tunnels were open in both directions there, so if they had to run, they still could. Like any decent tramway, it also covered a great deal of distance. Having a tram that only went a few blocks before stopping was ridiculous, after all.

But standing at the bottom of the tracks and staring up at the destroyed engine seated on the eastern track, Frank was struck by an idea. A typical tram would crisscross a city. That meant that at some point, somewhere, the tracks would cut under enemy territory, and if the enemy didn't occupy them there, or even if they did, it would be an artillery-free route to apply some hurt, if and when they ever needed or wanted to distract from surface action.

He turned, though, when a looming shadow fell across him. It was the first Elite, the one with the pattern of rake marks over his helmet and down one side of his chest armor. Flint had said his name in speaking to him, but Frank didn't immediately recall it.

"It is collapsed." The Elite said, his gothic baritone echoing not at all, miraculously, though every other sound the men made seemed to. "The way beyond this carriage is blocked."

"How do you – " Frank stopped abruptly, scowled deeply when that echoed back at him, and softer, finished, " – know that?"

The lighting was poor, though a few of the overheads still glowed softly, causing the Elite's small, round eyes to twinkle with moisture when he turned his horse-like head towards Frank. "I can see it? I have not lived as long as I have by failing to trust what my eyes show me."

Frank looked back at the engine, seated half in a very deep, very black shadow. "It's too dark."

"What of it do you see at all?" The Elite queried, sounding curious.

"Roughly half the engine car." Frank answered. More of it than that was under shadow, but that point was about where the utter lack of light got deep enough that it simply disappeared into a black void. "It looks like it was on fire for a while."

"It was." The Elite answered, his tone flat. "You have remarkable vision for a Human, but flawed still. I see clearly where the metal has twisted, and the rubble from the tunnel roof has gathered." He harrumphed at the end of the sentence, as if to accentuate it or punctuate it somehow, but Frank wasn't sure what it meant.

"Flint make it down here yet?" Frank asked, quietly.

That earned him another look. "One of your Humans?"

Frank sighed. "Your Human, actually. My brother."

"Ah, that one. I do not readily recall his Human name. He is known to us as 'Zelis." The Elite seemed to straighten somewhat from his casual hunched posture, and turned partway to look behind himself at the gathering Marines and Elites. Interestingly enough, they seemed to readily mix and mill for the time being, with neither side complaining. Frank supposed they'd sort out and separate soon enough. If oil and water were thrashed hard enough, they'd mix briefly, too.

"Is the other way open?" Frank asked, gesturing loosely at the other end of the track from where the dead engine sat.

The query was answered with a simple nod, only.

"Never really thought of your kind as nocturnal, though I guess it stands to reason." Frank muttered. "See pretty good in the dark."

"I am not _nocturnal_." The Elite harrumphed. "The measure was merely a part of my training as a warrior. One must be ready to face one's enemies under all conditions."

"Yes, but while I'm no stranger to fighting in the dark, after a point I just can't see at all, and I have to go by sound or feel." Frank amended. "You don't seem to have that point of exchange, is what I'm saying."

The Elite fixed him with what could only have been described as a contemplative look. "It was not always so."

From the group at the station proper, a voice cut above the subtle hum of racket; "Vy'atree. Kaskindee wants to see you, up top."

When both turned to address the source of the call, Frank immediately spotted Flint standing there – and who else could it have been, using Elite names so casually? If the Spartan spoke their language, Frank would not have been the least bit surprised. As the Elite strode away, hopping out of the track bed easily to continue up to the stair and out, the Spartan approached, dropping easily down into it to walk up to where Frank stood between the rails.

"Flint." Frank greeted, folding his arms across his chest.

Flint looked the dead engine car over once, then focused on his brother. "I miss something?" When Frank shook his head, Flint added, "What were you talking about?"

"That." Frank gestured at the engine car with a jerk of his chin, an indicative and dismissive gesture at once. "Got onto the topic of being able to see in the dark."

"They're a little like cats, in that regard." Flint mentioned. "Could spot a mouse a mile away in a cave if they wanted to."

"Yeah, sure." Frank shrugged. "He said something about how it wasn't always like that, though."

The Spartan just nodded, a small, subtle motion. "Vy'atree was blinded in combat some years before I met him."

Frank's eyebrows shot up. "Then how can he see?"

"Optical surgery, duh. This is the Covenant we're talking about. They spooned his eyes out of his head and replaced them with biomechanical receptors. He's a bit of an odd fellow because of it… many of the Elites are extremely touchy about their person… getting bloodied, getting scarred up. Having to suffer the touch of a medic. Various stupidities of that nature. Vy'atree made it sound like his base of origin as a kid made most of it moot anyway, and he couldn't have gotten any less than he'd started out. So rather than committing suicide as a useless person to preserve his bloodline's honor, he got himself some new eyes. The other Elites keep a distance from him because of it."

"I gather that you just gave a massive sideways mention to a culture I have never had explained to me, just then." Frank mentioned, nodding. "So more than half of what you just tried to explain went right over my head."

Flint cocked his head, his expression masked behind the golden visor. "Lost blood is lost honor. And I have yet to meet an Elite who wasn't so married to his precious honor that he'd let anything happen to it."

"Okay… so getting his face cut and losing his eyesight was…?"

"Bad, dishonorable. From their side of things, it spoke of his inability as a warrior, and if he'd been born with any kind of standing, he'd have probably committed suicide rather than be found that way… let alone allow someone to _repair_ him, heaven forbid. The… idea, I suppose, is that if you're a good warrior, you're good enough to not get caught, shot, or blown up. Therefore you'll never lose any blood, earn any scars or need to be put back together."

"So the part where you called it stupid makes sense now." Frank agreed. "And this… Vy'atree… he was there when you did your dirty deed and transformed yourself into a splitlip?"

Flint chuckled. "Yes."

"I have to say, Flint… for the moment, I like the tramway. It's closed, it's open, it's got room to run if we get bombed out. But I don't want the men to stay in here." Frank sighed, turning to watch as several of the wounded got their dressings changed.

Flint slowly turned around to watch the same. "Agreed."

"But." Frank began, inhaling deeply to sigh out through his nose. "The Elites' forward dispatch informs me that we reached the edge of the enemy's crescent, and they'll damn sure notice if we push on any farther. I'd like to get them out of the city. If we can claim a place at the back end of that ridge where Magrasse got dropped… it will open passageways to Carthenon and give us access to I-91, and that road goes all the way through Little Rock into Hesston. I know for a fact they dropped troops into Hesston, and there may well be more in Carthenon. But even if we stay and try to hold the city, it's a fool's errand to try to do so from a base _within_ the city."

"I hear you." Flint agreed.

"And I'd probably love the next ammo depo so much I'd kiss the supply officer on the mouth. We have too many guns and not enough men and sure as hell not enough ammunition to go around."

Flint cast him a look that was plain even through the visor; "Frank… that's disgusting."

Frank arched a blond brow in reply. "That's desperate."

"I could always borrow some of Obivok's guns, if you need." Flint offered.

"Who is Obivok?" Frank asked, confused.

"Your oppositional leader." Flint answered. "Also the Brute who wants my head pretty badly, I might note."

"Oh, that guy. Big fucker with the hammer, played punt-ball while back with you as the ball."

"That'd be him." Flint answered, entirely nonplussed at the mention.

Frank nodded. "Okay. I can work with that. If you can blow out his depot on your way out, that'd be dandy too. But no pressure."

Flint started to walk back towards the lip where the rail bed met the station floor, entirely without reply. If he was off on mission already, it wouldn't be much of a surprise.

"Oh, and Flint." Frank issued, causing the Spartan to pause, and turn his head. "Tell Vy'atree I'd like to talk to him as soon as his other buddy is done with him up there. Got a couple ideas, a couple questions, and would like some input."

Flint just nodded, before finishing his trek across the last track and hitting the floor of the station with a palm to practically vault fully the whole way up onto it. He did have to partially crouch up his legs to make the final few inches of distance, but he hadn't even jumped, like Vy'atree had done, though he made it look equally as effortless.

Frank felt a little outdone; the track bed was some six feet below the station floor, no great drop but a significant clamber to remount. It seemed, though, that it was true only for himself. Watching his twin roll about as if great feats were common everyday and unremarkable made him wish he could do all the same. Maybe if his men were the same, he'd quit losing so many of them.

With a sigh and a shake of his head, he looked back at the dead engine car. "Could'a been me."

.

**November 21, 2559**

Dawn came with the brutal realization; nowhere was left to run that the enemy didn't already know about. The lull between realization that the Marine's former location was empty and the discovery of their new position was annoyingly short. The only bright side of the shitty situation was the part where the Elites' scouting and recon ability was good enough to give them some warning before all hell broke loose.

Frank found himself the last man on the end, his shoulders hunched down over his rifle, a dented DMR that had someone else's blood splashed across the action and the stock. That hadn't been cleaned off yet because the introduction of the fight had killed the Marine who'd been holding the gun a few hours before.

It irritated Frank more than he liked to admit. What bugged him was that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't make himself calm down enough to have a level-headed reaction. This op, this world, was determined to test his command, to test his grit, and while it hadn't bitten him yet, Frank was sure he'd already failed the test and all that remained was for him and his men to get wiped out because of it. That irritated him, too.

Directly at sunrise, as the first six Elites came pelting back up 41st street to warn them at the tram entrance what was coming, the first wave of Jackals came swarming up from the open end of the tram line. Behind and throughout them were the Grunts, most of those carrying needlers and the ones that weren't, carrying heavy weapons. Eye-searing bolts of burning plasmic energy jumped in parabolic arcs over the front phalanx of vulture-like aliens and detonated on landfall around the tracks at Frank's flanks.

To his left, an Elite he hadn't learned the name of yet took one of the rounds straight to the face when he tried to dive out of the way of a different one. The impact was only as harsh as being punched, Frank imagined, because the rounds just didn't travel that quickly. It was almost as if they slid through the air more than flew. But being hit by charged ionized gas was never a happy occasion, and directly after it splashed around into a collar around the guy's neck, it promptly lost containment and the superheated gasses reacted chemically to the almost-frozen atmosphere around the Elite's head.

The detonation resulting warmed the air across the side of Frank's face to the point where his skin prickled hotly, but the shockwave it owned punted him off his braced kneeling position and sprawled him out across the raised tram tracks. He lost the rifle he'd been holding when his elbow made contact with the track top and that arm went numb from the elbow down. Dizzied but unwilling to lie and be killed without a fight, Frank pushed into a sideways roll to get back onto his knees, his eyes already tracing across the tracks for his missing rifle.

Within a split second of starting the search, he gave it up, reached down righthanded for his magnum and put the first round through a Jackal head some half-centimeter from the end of the barrel. Dimly he was aware of something wet crawling across his forehead, but he wasn't sure if it was sweat, his blood, or someone else's blood. If he'd been splashed when the Elite went down, that wouldn't be much of a surprise. If he'd been splashed by the Jackal when he'd blown its noggin open, that wouldn't be much of a surprise either. As the Jackal went down, Frank reached for the alien's shield-arm with his other hand, still tingling but starting to come active again. Finding his grip with that hand, he clamped it around the alien's limp, cold wrist and jerked the still-active shield up between himself and that next round.

Maybe all of a full second had passed. Impact felt like more than just a well-aimed fist. Revision of a couple of theories kicked in in the back of his brain as his foremind clamped down on motor function, trying to brace against the crushing push of being hit by a fuel-rod-cannon round. Frank felt the backwash splash back across the alien rank, felt the vacuum of consumed, burnt oxygen sucking into the opening behind the plasmic flames, and just as he got his knees under him again and the magnum out around the edge of the shield, it failed, searing a bright crimson color before it collapsed and left him holding the dead alien without reason.

Up from the rear of the swarm of shield-locked Jackals and supporting Grunt heavy weapons came an alien broader and taller than the rest, the flash of gunfire from both sides of the battle setting twinkling stripes of traveling light across his armor. Part of him committed to wondering if he had enough time to get to his feet and run before it was too late, while the rest of him concentrated on punching that exposed finger off the Jackal's hand to make the phalanx open.

When it did, the next round went in one vulture eye and out the other, and dimmed quite a few of the sparkles on the Brutes' armor. It kicked the dead alien aside before it could even fall over, but even as Frank's leg muscles pulled tight and he began a backwards thrust that might or might not even land him on his feet, the bigger alien closed the gap and extended the arm that held a bladed spike-rifle. Twin razor hooks sliced downward through the air, glinting against the poor light in the trackway, eager for blood.

Frank hauled up on the Jackal in his left hand, caught the bladed gun and turned it aside with the completion of the throw, hauling the alien over his own head and throwing it bodily into the broken phalanx. Aliens all down the line of locked shields went down under the burden, stricken with it so suddenly. Turned away and unbalanced, the Brute howled as his weapon was snatched from his hairy hand, the blades embedded in the Jackal's back and following it down into the ranks of its brethren.

As soon as his fist opened from the grasp of the Jackal's arm, Frank retracted that arm to his own chest, closing his fingers around the hilt of the tungsten-carbide, monomolecular diamond-edged black combat knife and dropped it out of the inverted sheath on his shoulder.

When the Brute turned back from the loss of his spike rifle to focus on the dirty Human kneeling in front of him, he saw said creature launching upwards in a standing leap with a sideways aimed magnum in one hand and the other arm coming up in a sidelong arc from the left. The Brute's mouth opened in angry retort a second before the blade punched through the metal of his helmet, embedding to the hilt through his ear. The Brute's body spasmed at the injury, but fell away sideways with the impact of the hit, even as light as it had been. Jerking the knife out on the Brute's way down, Frank pushed his magnum-hand out under the knife-hand and unloaded the last of the clip at the disarranged Jackals.

When the gun stopped firing, Frank's mind hit a hiccup; now what? To swim into the mass would be suicide. There were just too many of them, and it wouldn't take them but a few moments more to reorient and sort, and they'd mince him easily. Similarly, that same amount of time for the enemy to recover would remain true even if he turned tail and ran for it; again, not enough time to work with. They would cut him down before he even got _to_ the track wall, let alone had time to mount it and be across the tram deck towards the stair to streetlevel.

That moment passed, though, and on the right and the left four fast-moving Elites barreled in, bright sword blades lit and out front. Frank staggered back at first, but the melee was in full play, and the Jackals caught unprepared for it were minced as were the front rank of Grunts, the rearward forces backing out and turtling up in an attempt to stave off the inevitable. Something uneven under his left boot abruptly rooted his mind back into reality, snapping time-flow back to normal. He looked down at the anomaly in the floor between the tracks in curiosity as the Elites shredded the Grunts and Jackals ahead of him.

It was his rifle.

Plunging the empty magnum into the holster at his side, he reached for it, quickly snatching it up and focusing downrange again. Frank took a breath, trying to order his spinning thoughts, but there was nothing to shoot at. Plenty of enemy remained, but the sword-wielding Elites were in the way, and they were holding off the front rank quite nicely. Long enough for him to get his mind back in order, at least.

Tucking the rifle into an elbow, Frank tucked the knife back into the sheath on his shoulder and snapped the stressed keeper back around it to make sure it stayed. He'd never needed to jerk the knife out _through_ the keeper before, but he was glad that such a maneuver was possible. If the keeper had forbidden the motion, he'd be dead now. Still, making a habit of doing that would destroy the keeper and then it wouldn't secure the knife anymore.

Hands abruptly clamped down around his shoulders and he was hauled back. "It is time to pursue your troops, Leader, they would disorder if you were killed needlessly. Go, we can hold them here for a time." The baritone was obviously one of the Elites, but when he was put up onto the tram deck, Frank didn't bother to look back. Several Marines lay dead here and there, shot up during the surprise of the initial engagement, but there were far too few to be all of his men. He was the last Human left in the tram station, it seemed, and he knew for a fact that the Elites had only had that one guy who'd been beheaded by a fuel rod down here with them.

How long had it been before someone noticed he wasn't with the men? Who had decided to send Elites back to hold the line and widen the retreat window? Frank pushed the questions aside as his boots hammered the stair heading up to streetlevel, his fingers tucking tightly around the grips of the BR.

Questions, answers, talk in general, that would need to wait. For now, the enemy had found them, and they didn't have the ammunition to hold any given position. Hopefully, they weren't all just running right into another grinder.

.

November 22, 2559

Scrambling to the side turned into flipping end for end to the side when the collection of six plasma grenades all went off at once. Tori knew she shrieked when she felt herself invert in mid-air, but there was no memory of the sound itself, just of her vocals tightening around an exclamation. When she struck the pavement, she slid and half-rolled, until when she came to a stop she found herself propped on an elbow with her legs out behind her. Quickly she gathered herself up and jumped back to her feet.

Tucking into a sprint and squatting down halfway to retrieve her lost rifle – she seemed to drop it alarmingly often, unlike those Marines, who seemed to hold their guns like they were extensions of their arms – Tori brought it up and sprayed the front rank with the last of the magazine.

The thought that it might disorient or scatter or unbalance them fell flat when all it did was drop one Grunt onto its ass and annoy the absolute crap out of the Brute next to it. The Grunt got back up, and resumed shooting, the Brute shivered as if he'd been goosed, scratched at his torso like a savage ape, then resumed shooting. Annoyed that her waste of ammo was little more than just, Tori jerked the empty magazine out and traded it for a full one at her hips. She'd woken up this morning with a stomach ache, so moving at first had been disagreeable.

Now she was in motion, it still reminded her that it hurt in there, but so long as she didn't stop to humor it, it wasn't much of an impediment. The whole being found thing had ticked her off, though. At first, she'd engaged with unholy glee; but her wanton deliverance of ammunition to the downrange position hadn't served well once the battle was in full swing. Tori knew her aim truly sucked; even with all the practice she'd had over the past year, it was really nothing at all compared to what Flint could do with a gun.

She didn't know the first thing about using Covenant tech, either – and Flint would often use plasma grenades, and sometimes, those disappearing-blade sword-things that the Elites liked to carry. If it had a shooter end and a holding end, he'd hold it and shoot it. Tori often found herself staring at them wondering what in the gods creation she was looking at. That it was a weapon at all sometimes escaped her. The needlers – those funny mellon-shaped gadgets that shot exploding pink glass shards – were worst.

But getting to the point where she had admitted to herself that she was no Spartan, no soldier, even as much as she did recall being trained for it… that had hurt. Wounded so that she could never be as good as Flint, even though the whole soldier thing wasn't something that interested her or suited her style, Tori had steadily gone from trying to make up for it to simply bullying her way through each engagement and hoping she had a couple bullets left over at the end to show that she wasn't _actually_ wasting them.

It was depressing. Here was a situation she'd been _built_ for, and she was utterly useless. As pissed as that made her, Flint's constant attempts to straighten her tildy-shaped shooting only drove home the feeling. But just trying to talk about something else other than her pitiful skills on the battlefield hadn't netted much. While he appeared to be a living being, and as much as she could recall about the boy she vaguely recalled from before her augmentation issues, he'd had a little bit of tempering over the years. But while on the outside he seemed to give a damn, and one would get the impression that he really was there to save the world and that he cared about that sort of thing… on the inside, and worse when he was field-stripping some of the equipment rather than using it, there didn't appear to be much beyond the frigid mechanics of a machine.

That hurt, too.

Tori didn't really remember closing the gap, and she couldn't have told if she'd run, walked, strolled or strutted to get there, but when she focused outside her own musing brains, she found her fist driving the nosebones of that itchy Brute back up into his brain. Now, _this_ part she was plenty good at. Staying fit back at the laboratory inside the asteroid had not excluded combat calisthenics. That detail had been mostly her own fault, though, because at the early stages of her imprisonment there, she'd been all for the fight to the death wearing armor and shooting guns thing. All her life prior to then had been training and the occasional trial run where an op that was technically fake but as close to realism as possible was presented.

Hand-combat was something Tori remembered. It was also a good way to wear oneself out, exert all the anger and frustration one owned, and be done with it. When she next looked, that sit-down Grunt was dead, but if she'd killed it first or last or somewhere in between with some collateral motion she didn't know. Oh well, dead was dead, it was the same condition all Flint's targets obtained when he was done with them.

The Brute and the Grunt at his heel were not the only problem people in the street with her, though. The gunfire was constant, but with her jumping into their cover and beating them individually to a pulp was keeping them from considering much advancement. It also made them concentrate their fire on her, and the handful of Marines helping her to hold the position got free target practice without needing to pay for it for a while. It was an auxillary location, mainly, one that was off to the side of where the rest of the men were trying to run through to escape the ambush that had come just before morning down inside the tram station.

Flint had just finished convincing her to go on a supply run – basically run shooting into a Brute weapons' depo, grab a bunch of shit and run shooting back out of it, bringing said loot back for the Marines to use – and they had just set out to do as much when the attacking forces hit. They'd tried to hit from all sides at once, but Flint being there kept the surface forces from getting too close while the underground forces drove the Marines out of the tram station. As a result, there wasn't a pinch, and the Marines didn't get slaughtered.

Tori felt rotten for delaying their departure by being an ass and needing convincing, but on the other hand, would they have ever met the assault force in the first place if they'd set out right away? What difference would their relative position to the tram station have made, closer or farther? Tori had wasted a lot of ammunition trying to hit stationary targets, and Flint had carefully cut the legs out from under every last moving one, making her not only look bad, but feel bad, too.

And he wondered why she was always mad at him. No duh! Maybe he saw it as him making up for her slack, letting her pick her targets and taking care of the ones she didn't have time for. Maybe he thought he was doing her a favor, helping out. Maybe he didn't realize how inadequate, how useless he made her feel every time they ran an op within sight of one another.

Sigh.

And even when she tried to express that, tried to convince him why she didn't want to be near where he was shooting, he either failed utterly to get it, or else he'd think she was accusing him of having bad enough aim that she feared he'd wind up shooting at _her_. That version tended to make _him_ grumpy, and then the argument would take a turn for the ridiculous, and they'd both forget what they were originally arguing about and just start throwing all the perceived faults out there and just have it out.

Tori hated talking to him, or trying to talk to him. He either never said a single word, sufficing with standing there mutely staring at her with that blank look in his eyes, or else he'd have some angle to argue from, and he'd either wind up trying to correct her terminology or else her interpretation of things. A soldier she was not. A people-person, she'd thought she might have been, though certainly was convinced she nolonger was.

She'd taken the cat back to the other quarter and he'd slept alone for the better part of the last three months because of this. Their current op – that of Fargo – was just one more where it was more of the same. Severing a Jackal's head between the pavement and the edge of its own arm shield, Tori tore the rebreather off a Grunt next to it and brained the thing in the mouth with her other fist. The Grunt either had badly positioned teeth or else a fragile skull, because it plopped over dead while a long, pencil-shaped green flame fed out of the torn air hose leading to the tank. Methane usually just detonated and was done with it, but apparently she hadn't torn or broken the modulator, and the gas wasn't escaping fast enough to explode.

Oh well. Not a big deal. It could sit there and burn if it wanted to. Yay for atmospheric chemical reactions, right? The rebreather went into a Brute's open mouth, her other fist made sure he bit down on it pretty hard, then she kicked it in the throat and sent it into a sprawl on its back – on which it had slung a bladed weapon. Whee! Two Brutes tried to take her on from the left, and behind them she saw a raised hand holding a mini-sun.

Tori dropped to a hand and slung both feet out to unbalance both forward Brutes, knocking them onto their asses. One fell against the grenade-thrower, but the grenade of mention was already in flight, and it had been angled up more than out to arc over the front two to land, perhaps, on Tori. She took her hand out from under her without waiting to see where it was first, and rolled promptly aside, and when she was face-down, slammed both palms into the pavement to rebound back to her feet. Catching on the ball of one foot, she pivoted back around and launched straight into the rear Brute right as the front two got back upright enough to try to escape the grenade.

It detonated and tossed them all four from their respective upright positions, but Tori hadn't planned to stay standing anyway, and had one leg wrapped around the targeted Brute's shoulder. He'd have gone down anyway, blast or no blast. With a hand over each ear on the alien, she jerked its head sideways, knocking loose its hold on her wrists and shattering its neck at once. Standing up over its lolling head, she leapt nimbly to the nearest of the other two. Catching the balancing arm that had reached upwards as it tried to sit up, she spun her hips around the elbow and dropped a boot on its head, tucked under its jaw so the skull squashed out at an awkward angle, splitting open and squirting brain matter and blood all over the road.

Seeing the other Brute was backing up, already on its feet and scrambling to bring a weapon to bear, Tori just dropped to kneel on the curb-stomped brute's chest, tucked her rifle to her shoulder and pulled the trigger.

One round fired, that one round slipping in through the top of the left eyesocket, and blew the skull open out the back of the Brute's head.

Tori raised her head, puzzled. It was an MA – that made it damn near fully automatic. A trigger-pull should have provided more than one bullet, and she knew she was ten parts lucky as all hell and no parts anything else that that one bullet had done any good at all. Her confusion washed away instantly when she saw the reason; that one bullet's brass had stovepiped in the action, caught by the slide bar and wedged tightly against the next round, which looked like it had exploded rather than firing.

Said replaced confusion broiled outwards as she brought the MA out from her shoulder, and slung it like a boomerang at the next nearest alien – a hapless Grunt. Her howl was roughly nine parts anger and one part English word. The gun struck the Grunt, spun around its little neck like a lance-line, and the alien went down gagging on a crushed windpipe.

Tori inhaled through her furious grimace, aware her guts were competing fervently for attention. In all the time she had known him, Flint had never, ever, _ever_ jammed his gun. On anything. For any reason. He'd even saturated it in blood more than once and the damn thing had _still_ worked right for him.

But for Tori? Nooooooooo.

That was about when the artillery started to come down. Focusing outward in startled surprise at the abrupt, seemingly sourceless, very large explosion half a block away, Tori realized several things at once; the first and foremost among them was that she was very suddenly alone where she had been surrounded by quite a few aliens a moment ago. The alienness of that utter lack of aliens struck her profoundly, and even before she knew why, she spun around and screamed, _"FALL BACK!"_

The remainder of the rain of artillery seemed to come down all at once, the giant orbs of contained reactive plasma scorching large craters out of the street, out of the buildings, out of the bodies she'd plowed through. Her triage of Brutes evaporated into a fine red mist barely after she was past them, pelting hell for leather across the street heading back the way she'd been defending. There was no way to tell where the next round was going to fall, or even how they had gotten so many rounds into the air at once, but while her visor was alternately clear and too black to see through, she could tell she was making considerable headway, and the Marines ahead of her were, too.

She was still catching up to them. The rearmost was just out of arm's reach when her visor went black, then abruptly split and a spiderweb of cracks splintered the exosheathing of the glass. A billion knives punched through her at every conceivable point as if she'd been clamped into by an iron maiden. A searing heartbeat later, she realized she was in the air, and just as the tinting capability of her shattered visor began to fade out and fail, she struck the ground hard across her shoulders. Momentary terror of breaking her neck with that impact shook her foggy outlook, but then the rattling tumble of spinning over one's own dual-point axis as she came earthward again centered into an attempt to ball up.

She got halfway tucked when she wrapped around something very hard and very solid, anchored securely to it for a full century, then peeled away and struck the actual ground where she spread and lay still. Most of her body wasn't checking in at that point, though her head was pounding unmercifully, the sprinkle of shattered visor across her face irritating her eyes and the inside of her nostrils. About a decade later, pain spiked through her chest and she remembered how to cough.

As her brain began to reorient, she realized the Marine in front of her some two thousand years ago must have been vaporized. Absently she wondered if the shelling was still going on – and if any of the other men with her had gotten out of the way.

It would be impossible to tell, really… not until she got to the point where she knew if she even still _had_ a body anymore. If she did, then she could proceed to the part where she would get up and go looking for them. If the hit she'd taken had been in any way shape or form direct, then doubtless they all thought she was as dead as the Marine she'd been chasing. At the moment, that assessment didn't feel too far from the truth.

Abruptly, gravity whirled and she was yanked off the pavement, broken and uneven as it was, and lifted to drape over two points of support, tipped slightly against a third.

If that was Flint, making up for all her shortcomings _again_…

Well, at least it nice of him, this time.

.

November 23, 2559

Running through the falling artillery had kept his shielding stuck at nil. Shrapnel stitched patterns across his Mjolnir combat skin, sometimes striking with enough force to push him around. Once it had even thrown him to his knees, a dangerous position to be in given what the place was enduring.

East and west of the main body of Marine forces, the shelling had positioned and let fly. Nobody was getting through that, and it was creeping upward after their retreating flank. There just was nowhere left to run. Their position had been compromised, and god only knew what by, but the troop movement was severe and harsh. The press to flee the tram station had wiped out all of the watch, and part of the defending flank. Several Elites went down trying to make up for the gaps in the falling Marines.

And at the east flank, tucked against a bank and just shy of the open highway leading through the city, Tori and six Marines had bunkered up to hold the ground against what had appeared to be yet another crushing infantry line. It had turned into a free for all for the artillery, and the same had been found at the western flank, too. Vy'atree had been out that way, driving the rear migration to stall out the caging motions of the enemy. They were being pinched through a guillotine, and the artillery was following their footsteps faster than they were making them.

Only one of the Marines had made it back through the Elite's TEC, and he'd said everyone else was dead. Tori had this certain kind of unlucky streak, though… he'd tucked down through an alley so no one would catch him and stop him, or worse, try to go with, and he'd backtracked through the shells trying not to get squashed by one.

When he found the old defensive position where Tori had split off to hold ground, he found more than a few bullet-free corpses. Oh, nice. Not again. She only did that when she was _really_ mad. Usually it meant the next conversation with Flint didn't involve words quite so much as actions. But he only saw one Marine, or most of the man, anyway, and no sign of the other four. He did see her rifle, though, which he scooped up on his way by. Finding it had a crumpled brass sticking out of the action, he jerked that out and cycled the thing, ejecting a ruined round from behind it. Interestingly, it closed properly when it slid forward again, so he left it at that and went back to looking.

There, tucked against the side of what had once been a ceramacrete building, everything above knee-height gone to oblivion, and right on the edge of a deep mortar crater, was Tori, her armor stenciled with a billion pock marks and embedded shards of shrapnel. Large swatches of the ablative coating were missing, either vaporized or sloughed off in the heat, but she only had about half of a rather ragged visor left, and part of her sun shield was missing on top of that. Direct hit? Possible. Only if she'd taken it with a full shield.

Flint scooped her up, turned and ducked back the way he'd come, holding her firmly and running as fast as he could. He'd need to get back through the wall of falling shells if he meant to get anywhere near Frank and his men, or, more necessarily, their long-abandoned sloop. If the enemy hadn't found it and destroyed it, that was.

Flint scowled at the thought of what he'd do to the bastard who dared kill the cat. He _liked_ that cat, and she'd never done anything to anybody to need that kind of ending. She didn't even use her claws when massaging random bodyparts left exposed for a cat like her to play with!

Okay, so she'd tug on his chin from time to time. But that was only if he tried to sleep in. Which actually wasn't that often.

Mid-step, he laughed a little. "Tori, you've corrupted me irreparably." It was her cat, after all. And here he was, on a rescue-run, in a hot-zone, at risk of being shelled out of his brains, and he was thinking up revenge for a cat! A cat who, better still, may or may not have even suffered a fate needing avenging. How many S-II's did that? Though in fairness, the cat had been a better companion than Tori had, and he was running through hell to retrieve Tori, so why not grant the cat similar values?

A similar thought struck him somewhat sideways; at what point had he begun to think, more or less out loud, like this? Dimly he recalled the fairly restricted mental patterns of his past; obtain intel, assess situation, engage mission, service targets, pursue completion. Usually this process didn't even involve needing to duck excessively. Not that he hadn't – the Spartan-II way of fighting made up for that. Then, after crashing his Longsword over a Covenant-owned world as the last Human to fall from the sky, everything had changed. He'd played tag-a-long with the Elite that had dug him out of the crashed bird so he could be shown the nearest starport at which he'd then kill everyone and fly out. It hadn't worked out that way, though, and now, several years later and several missions at the elbows of former enemies later, he'd gone through something of a mental backflip that he'd gotten stuck in.

And it made him vengeful of anyone wanting to hurt a cat he didn't even own. She was Tori's cat.

Damn splitlips…

By some stroke of unlikely odds, Flint made it through a brief lag in the shelling without even being close to an eruption. Meeting up with the Marines at the center of another firefight, he immediately looked for a place to drop Tori off so he could go assist. She eased that intention by stirring, so he just put her down, pulled her rifle off his back, dropped it into her hands and said, "Mind the TEC for me, will you? Got some action up front."

He heard her mumble something faintly as she stared blankly at the gun lying across her arms, but when she raised a hand and curled those fingers around the grip, he turned and moved out, leaving her with the majority of the wounded and several guards positioned at the flank of the moving formation. So long as they kept in motion the way they were, any hits on that part of their formation would be light, because it would need to actively chase them as it engaged.

Halfway to the front of the unit, Flint felt all the hair on his neck stand up, so he caught the Marine he was passing and dove sideways, just in time to be missed by a direct hit. The mortar round was alone, thankfully, but while Flint lost his shielding when it went off, and simultaneously was punted through the remains of a freestanding wall, bringing it down, his captured comrade didn't fare so well.

Shouldering off the debris, he looked at the Marine, noting how most of his gear looked worse burnt than he did – this didn't deter the fact that he'd died, though, so after yanking the man's dogtags off his neck, the Spartan stepped back out into the pounded street and kept moving. Here had already been pounded pretty hard, so jumping pitfalls and crumbling craters long since cold made the trip interesting. All around him, Marines and a scattering of Elites trying to regroup through the masses of moving troops shouldered forward, many of them trying to participate in the forward firefight. On occasion a bullet, spike, or plasma shot would fly deeper than the front rank of three deep and embed in someone or something behind that position, though not often.

Lacking a clear route around the last crater, Flint elected to straighten his vector and leap across the breadth of the pit instead. He almost made it to the far side, but while he got a hand around roadbed rebar to stall his slide back to the bottom of the thing, it proved to nolonger be attached to anything firm enough to hold up a suit of Mjolnir, and he went sliding down anyway. Flint caught at what he hoped was a rock when he met the bottom, but just as he stood, that suddenly caved and dropped him into what he thought was a cavern pocket formation. It was odd to find that sort of thing under an established city – foundation was usually dug a bit deeper than this – but when he shook the dust off his visor and flipped on the lights on his helmet's cheekbands, he found himself looking down a long, stooping, narrow mineshaft. The iron banding supporting the throughway suggested it had been drilled barely after the first colony ship made landfall; Fargo had not turned up much in the way of mineral content worth mining.

That sort of thing tended to be found out, though, long after a few companies did a bit of search drilling.

Dust cascaded down both ahead and behind, drifts of loose powder and occasional puddles of wetted sludge marking the rust banding on the iron supports. Flint inhaled. "What the hell. Can't be worse than up there." When he stood up, he could reach the iron band he'd mistaken for a rock and bent under, but he had to reach over his head to do so. Walking the route would not incite a murderous backache by the end of the day.

Climbing out of the shell crater, the Spartan pushed through the soft, fluffed dirt to the roadbed and hauled out of it, looking for where his brother might be. Toggling the radio and hoping the Marine was somewhere where he could hear it past the explosions and gunfire, Flint asked, "Sergeant, I think I have a viable exit."

Blessedly, the response was prompt, and it sounded clear enough. "You think? I need better than you think." For the first time, he actually sounded like an officer speaking on behalf of harried forces.

Flint grunted, unsurprised. "Make that, 'I found somewhere to be that isn't owned by Brutes'."

"Where?"

Flint hit the zoom on his visor, looking over the heads of the Marines in the front. "Fifty meters from the frontline."

There was a pause. "That's cutting it rather close, don't you think, Chief?"

"Want to argue about it?" Flint asked, musingly, as he looked up at the sound of wailing plasma mortars.

Frank sighed loudly at him. "I'm bringing up the Charlie. Fire on the left flank just got hotter than hell. We're effectively pinched tight as a drum. This better not be a bust, or we're all as good as dead."

"Wouldn't dream of it, Sergeant." Flint answered, tracking the trajectories of those mortars. Ahead, the combat line broke, and the enemy began to pull back quickly. All the math and guesswork evaporated; no question if the ground forces were pulling out. Those shells were aimed right for right where he was standing. Was there enough time? "Might want to hurry, though."

"I see them. Enroute." Was all Frank said.

Flint let go of the zoom, and sighed, looking down again at the hole he'd punched at the bottom of the old shell crater in the middle of a highway. Their luck could not have been worse, though similarly, it could not have been weirder. "I hope so."


	10. That Happens, Sometimes

**10; THAT HAPPENS, SOMETIMES**

November 23, 2559

Flint dropped back into the hole first, flipped his lights back on and took point. The shaft was wide enough to accommodate some three or so guys, four if they were skinny and their battle rattle was mostly empty. He didn't have to wait long for the first of the Marines to slip in behind him, but they were carrying everything they had already and their number had been trimmed yet again. There were now a little under a hundred and forty men, with twenty-six Elites backing that up. This down from two hundred ten, and forty-two.

Their last run had gotten them hammered, though it was a small mercy to their mobility that the majority of the first wave to fall had not been healthy Marines. Down to only five wounded who needed help getting moving, and only twelve others who didn't, the group could go faster sooner.

That detail helped, as the first shells down struck unoccupied ground, or simply scattered and obliterated troopers who were already dead, most of whom had been detagged and quickly stripped of useful equipment. Nobody wanted to add to the death count by insisting on dragging dead bodies along, slowing the procession, especially since they had lost damn near half their already hammered count.

Flint kept them moving quickly, but while it strung out their number, there were no immediate branches in the shaft and being clumped up tight was nobody's idea of fun anyway. When the last of the troops were down through the broken opening in the roof of the mine shaft, Tori slid in behind them, watching the rain of mortars striking the city that nolonger even resembled a city, and flattening the rubble hills and scattering the dust. Turning away from the sight, she limped forward after the retreating line of men and Elites, hoping not to get left behind.

At least, somehow, Flint had found her rifle and given it back to her. He'd also somehow un-stovepiped the brass caught in the action and cleared the chamber of the exploded round, and though logic would suppose such a gun might not work properly anylonger, she had fired it once or twice since he abandoned her at the rear of the unit and it seemed to work fine. She'd done that, of course, while still too groggy to understand that said gun ought not function correctly.

Since it did, she was going to use it; and oh well if at some point it decided to explode in her hands. They were armored, even if her visor was half missing and the rest of the way too cracked up to be anylonger transparent.

Focused on that, she reached up and popped out the last of it, figuring the helmet could continue to protect everywhere except her face, but she still needed to see out. As she left behind the visibility of the daylight on the floor of the mineshaft, she felt the crackling, crawling electric charge of her armor systems reactivating the shielding. Without a visor on which to display a HUD, she had no idea what condition it was in, or even why it was still working.

For the moment, though, she would be grateful that it was, and leave it at that. At the end of her mental list of self-diagnostic assessment, she realized that her guts had quit churning, and nolonger hurt.

Small bright spot in an otherwise utterly crappy day, eh?

.

November 24, 2559

_I have a bone to pick with you. You thought you had defeated me. You thought that I was gone. You thought you could rest at night without fear._

_You were wrong._

Most of his face did not grow fur anylonger. Most of that was covered in gnarled, rumpled puckers of skin resembling melted wax. Staring at his almost-one-eyed visage in the vaguely reflective properties of the top of a ranking Elite's helm, Obivok of the Black Paw could only snarl. He had been a striking Jiralhanae Chieftain once. 'Zelisee had stolen that from him. The thoughts of vengeance, of restoring his lost glory, helped. But thoughts alone never did anyone any good. Brutes did not ascend to the halls of fear and respect by thinking. They did it by acting.

By hunting down all those who thought themselves good enough to spite them, and killing them all. By asserting one's power and prowess, making sure without doubt that all others knew and _understood_. But not 'Zelisee. Not that accursed… thing. And what was he, anyway? The wretched Elites called him as one of their own. He resembled more a Human, though, which raised questions.

Sangheili inbreds had slaughtered Human scum for better than thirty years. How in the fires of Ragnarok then, did one of one kind wind up being a member of society in the ranks of the other? There was no doubt that 'Zelisee was revered, respected, feared, a totem figure. He was the one they modeled their own aspirations around, it seemed, and those who knew who he was all bowed their heads in reverence to his name. He was their greatest warrior, a brother they were honored to have known, honored to have fought beside. Obivok didn't doubt that the idiot reptiles would have been honored even if all 'Zelisee did to them was cut off their testicles. It was shameful, really, the way they all thought of him as some kind of perverted super-being.

'Zelisee, whatever he was, remained mortal. He could be defeated. It had to be – _had_ to. It was a test, this… odd creature. The Ancestors had either seen to it that Obivok's reign was asserted beyond question among the other Clans, by handing him a warrior to shame all other fighters to claim the head of, or else they thought him inadequate to rule his own Clan unless he accomplished such a feat. Alas, which was true? Who could know? In either case, Obivok was practically required to hunt down and slay the… thing. Creature. Alien. Sangheili? Human? Cross between the two, some sick genetic experiment, clarified and brought to fruition in some perverted laboratory?

Too many questions remained, too many. It made Obivok's head ache trying to comprehend the complexity of the beast set before him. Set to challenge him. That alien turd had haunted Obivok's dreams, both sleeping and waking, ever since their paths had initially crossed. He was a blight on everything any Jiralhanae had ever experienced, and for the souls of the Ancestors, something had to be done.

Someone, ultimately it couldn't matter who, would need to take the legendary 'Zelisee down. Was it woe or fortune that Obivok was chosen as the first runner-up, to be replaced only upon his failing, and disgrace? If he fell before 'Zelisee, no one would really notice. Apparently, this sort of thing was what the beast did on casual days. On the flip side, nobody would remember Obivok's name, no one would care that at one point, he'd been a powerful Chieftain, lord over his own clan. That bothered him.

Moreover, the most disturbing thing about 'Zelisee was that, even as much as he seemed to be protecting the Sangheili and Human interests, he had a cold interior, unconcerned with Clan or Ancestor, not even particularly invested in his own honor, such as Sangheili tended to be. No… he had brought Obivok to his knees because he _could_, had stolen the food from Obivok's mouth before he could even taste it – could even _kill_ it – because he _could_, and for little more reason than just. Once he'd taken it away, he'd pushed it by the wayside and proceeded to further torment the Chieftain.

What audacity! To steal away with, and claim a prize hard-won, and then toss it away as if it had no value. To delight only in the battle itself, and not in the reward granted for winning it. Obivok had fled him at that first fight for this reason – how does one bring down a beast with no morals, no vices, no weakness?

'Zelisee seemed to be the ultimate warrior. He was not a Clan member, not a Chieftain, not a father or a son or a brother. He simply was, beginning, middle, end. Everything about him was war, was battle, was the fight. He had no glory, no prestige, no honor, nothing to decide his hand, nothing to soften his sides for a blow to pride that might open the way to his vitals and allow a combatant to win.

Was the… thing… a machine?

Hmm. That part being a truth would clarify nearly all of the other questions arisen by the facets of what Obivok had seen. Yes… that was it. 'Zelisee was a machine, and he was controlled by a purely logical algorithm, one of those _Aey-Eyes_ that the old Covenant had warned so much about.

Humans used them.

Pheh. Machines could be _broken_. Obivok smiled at his wretched reflection, and petted the blemishless helm with a gentle stroke of his paw. Now he had an idea of how to proceed. Machines could be _broken_.

.

November 25, 2559

Spending more than a day in a musty, stale mineshaft that constantly dribbled dirt onto the passing Marines using it proved unsettling, but nary a soul save themselves was to be seen. If the mineshaft had evaded detection by the Brutes, it was a small miracle. But it seemed to just go on forever, directionless, turning here and there just a little, enough to be noticeable as a bend in the otherwise straight tunnel, but without corner or junction.

Keeping the wounds of the injured clean under those conditions was difficult – at any given point, the ground would shake and shudder from the activity aboveground, and more soil would cascade down. It was a wonder the shaft hadn't filled in already, given how old it was.

So when he spied a spot of daylight on the floor of the mineshaft up ahead, it came as something of a relief even for Flint. He'd been trapped in similar places before for longer, but not so similar as to have been _long_ and _straight_ and utterly mind-numbing. And generally, there tended to be other things in it, like aliens to shoot at. Having enemy to plow through tended to give one a sense of progress that the passing, identically rusty iron bands on the walls of this shaft did not.

Signaling the Marines behind him to stop where they were, Flint stepped into a fast trot to close the gap to that other opening alone. Meeting it, he aimed his rifle up, then carefully, cautiously, stepped forward into the light until he could see clearly out the hole and was looking at sky. He could hear the Marines muttering to one another about how he'd lit up like a lightbulb doing that, the brilliance of broad daylight washing out all the color on his person and making him appear as if a silhouette of white on the background of more dismal black mineshaft. Hearing nothing from overhead, though, he secured his rifle to his back and reached up to climb out.

Barely had he made it as far out of the hole as his armpits then a two-fingered, two-thumbed hand grabbed his arm and hauled him up. Once free of the hole, Flint turned himself around, and looked curiously at the beaten-looking Elite standing in the bottom of the impact crater with him.

"Well." Flint began, imagining he didn't really look much better than that, himself. Toggling the comn, he added, "Sergeant, all clear. Move the men up."

"Solid copy." Frank didn't dally, either, and presently Marines began to push one another out of the same hole in the ground Flint had come out through. The Elite watched that with some bemusement, before his expression changed to surprise when the first of his own kind pried out and stood up.

Flint studied the fellow for a while, wondering why he hadn't said anything yet, before deciding to break the ice. "Anyone here with you?"

Not entirely unexpectedly, all he got was a nod. At least it was a nod, though, and not a head-shake. Following that reply, the Elite turned and paced up out of the crater, his hooves shoveling plates of twisted shrapnel that resembled old-Covenant metal as he went. Flint found the surface to be the side of a large, rolling hill, the top of which was washed clean of debris. The bottom of which framed a soggy mud-stripe that had once been a creek, and the standing pipes, rod towers, and bus blocks of what had once been a power plant.

The Elite didn't go toward the plant, though, instead stepping briskly out toward the plant's eastern perimeter, and circled it slightly to end up in the industrial park beyond. Much of that was intact, though riddled with hand-held weapons' scoring. Needle shards lay all over the street, foot-long iron spikes still embedded in wanton ribbons up some walls, broken holes where bullets had embedded and large burnt swaths where plasma fire had lanced the surfaces. Infantry fire, mostly, with a few crumbled corners suggesting shoulder-carried heavy weapons here and there.

It was a far sight prettier than downtown where the offices and corporation headquarters had been… this part of town had not been shelled mercilessly, so it all still looked like a city. Flint paused at a stand of spikes embedded in a wall sheathed in false bricking, and studied the dark red stain leading down from three of them. Whoever had been pinned to the wall by those spikes had apparently been pulled down from them after the fight was done, but there was no sign of the body or whoever had claimed it.

Farther in, at the corner of a crossing in the street, the silent Elite pulled up shy, and touched his communications unit.

Flint cycled for interference, and found the channel used quickly enough; the Elite was clicking, but even though Flint had heard of that being used before, he'd never used it himself. The pattern was short enough, repeating twice before stopping. A few seconds later, a reply click-pattern piped through, and a lone Marine up the block across the intersection appeared from a parking lot.

Flint followed the Elite as the gap between them was closed. The alien was keeping close attention to all the corners and angles, checking high several times as if he'd been agitated by snipers enough times to become paranoid about them. When they reached the Marine, the man stared hard at Flint, as if disbelieving a Spartan would appear on his watch. Flint had to admit the odds of such a thing happening to someone in a very bad situation were poor, but hey, this was _his_ lucky day, not the Marine's!

"…sir." The Marine greeted, sounding speculative. He glanced past Flint, then, at the pursuing small army of other Marines and the trimmed gaggle of Elites behind them.

Flint nodded at him. "You in charge here?"

The Marine shook his head – and not surprising, given that his half-concealed insignia suggested Corporal or so. "Lieutenant's up top. He'll want to see you."

Flint gave that some thought, before half-turning to look back, his eyes searching the small sea of gathered faces for Frank. "Understood." Finally spying him – there were only two hundred or so individuals, a quarter of those not even close to Human, after all – Flint waved him up.

Arriving at the front, Frank asked, "Situation? What have we got, Chief?"

"So far? One guy. Says his Eltee is up top… wherever that is." Flint answered. "He'll probably want to talk to you more than to me."

"Master Sergeant, oh." The Corporal stammered. "Right, sir. This way, I'll take you to him." He started away, Frank in close pursuit, but they didn't get far before Frank asked his next question.

"How many men here, Corporal?"

"Just the one company. There were three battalions stationed at this quadrant but we got driven out of Carthenon three days ago. They pounded our retreat until we made the ridgeline, but just when the Eltee thought he'd find reinforcements and bunker up, another damn enemy emplacement caught wind of us and pounded us some more. We're mixed, sir, but head-count is one full company."

As the duo made the interior of a warehouse and turned to the side, ostensibly heading for a stairwell to head up, Flint heard one final word out of Frank; "Nice." He couldn't tell if that was genuine or sarcastic.

Outside, several other Marines from the Corporal's group appeared, one a medic with an armload of medical supplies. These he pitched at the ground near the first wounded member of Frank's men to stop moving, and promptly began to tear some of it open to redress the man's wounds.

Turning back to the Elite, Flint narrowed his eyes. "You don't talk much, I take it."

The comment earned him only a blank-eyed stare.

Finally, one of the other Elites moved up to them, and in his native Sangheilian dialect added, "Do you refuse or merely lack the sounds?"

Finally – and in that same dialect – the Elite answered, "I do not confess as I understand any of them, brother. Their voices are jumbled, indistinct. We have an… understanding, not of words but of purposes."

Softly, Flint added, "Marines are like that." _Ngla'ekt akt Mghraeen gua'hau ag 'oon._ Not easy words to speak from a Human throat, but long-ago learned and long in the use, it was easier than it had been in the past.

It made the quiet Elite stare at him as if he were a thing possessed.

.

November 26, 2559

They were closer, now. Closer, and in a blind spot, apparently. Given all that had elapsed thus far, that eventuality seemed ludicrous. But all the same, the fighting in the business district had long ago cleared out, and the bunkered Marine forces there had been taking all their hit and run operations far, far from it. They were not about to try their luck by attracting attention when all previous attentions had gotten their asses royally flogged for them.

Frank seemed willing enough to agree with that; it was part of why his own command was so damn small at the moment. Flint took a moment, finally, to run a tight-link diagnostic on the whereabouts and disposition of the sloop, and when he was done, he went to find where Tori had piled up. He found her inside the main storage warehouse underneath the upper-story command expedient, sitting propped against the exterior wall with her head back and her helmet in her lap under her hands. If she'd died, it wouldn't be much of a stretch, but if she lived, she gave no overt sign of it.

He did get a response, though, when he hit the side of her knee with the toe of a boot, though. Bringing her head down, she looked up at him, her expression twisting into half-pained, half-weary. "What?" She sounded slightly less grouchy than he expected, so he tried to take it as a good sign.

"Wondered if you'd died sitting there." He answered, before reaching up and lifting his own helmet off. Without activating the cheek lights, or else flipping on the spectrum filters in the visor itself, looking through the helmet made the place seem darker than it was. Tori pretty much disappeared in the gloomy lighting anyway, being as she was chocolate-skinned and wearing tactically patterned armor.

She frowned at him. "Bits of me die here and there, but you never seem to notice, so why would you if the whole rest of me did as much?" It was a snipe, meant to be cutting.

Flint just didn't feel up to letting it hurt, though. He had other things on his mind, and letting Tori piss him off wasn't on that list. "Don't wanna hear it, Tori. These Marines have all the same problems ours do – not enough munitions."

"And what, you want me to go and fix that for them?" She grabbed her helmet up and struck it against his nearest leg, hard enough to make him take a step back. "Not happening, hero. I'm _tired_, I'm _sick_, and I don't want to run no damn ops with _you_!"

Flint heard her out, let her wind down, and just when she thought he had no response whatsoever to that spiel – a reply she found more irritating than words – he answered. "No, Tori… you've a moment to catch forty winks if that's what you need." That said, however, he just promptly turned away and walked, leaving her behind.

Leaving her feeling as though all her cutting jibes had been turned about and applied to her own hide, flaying it suitably enough to make it ache. She cast a hurt look after his retreat, but he didn't look back, she just dropped her own helmet back onto her head and wished the visor were still intact so she could hide her face behind it. The longer she knew him, the more she felt convinced that he had three layers; the hard, toughened exterior he wore when fighting battles, a thin warm layer under that where he felt camaraderie for his eccentric twin brother the Marine-person, and under that was where he kept the solid, unbreakable, un-meltable ice that was his heart.

It was only when he didn't turn back up at all – to anyone's notice that she could find to ask – that she wondered if maybe he'd caught some of that verbal flak after all, and gone and done that weapons-run by himself because of what she'd said. That no one had seen him leaving, and no one, not even Frank, knew that he was gone, was alarming, however. Flint was capable of being subtle, but it was the first time he'd just up and given everyone the slip. It didn't seem like him at all.

He stayed gone for nearly two days, and when he returned, he came in through the Marines' guard lines the same way he'd gone out through them.

.

November 28, 2559

"Here."

Tori looked up, having perched her elbows on the steel plate railing on the roof of a building across the street from the Marines' command post, to find herself looking squarely at her own face. It was a bent reflection, pearlescent and golden. She reached up, and hooked her gloved fingers upward into the lip of the helmet where her head would slip inside, and took it down from between herself and the presenting previous holder. "You been out there a while."

Flint had his helmet on, and a brand new set of scrape marks across the top of a pauldron signaling he'd not had a cake-run getting her the helmet, but his face was hidden. Whatever expression he wore, it was concealed. "It happens." For the moment, he didn't have a tone, either.

Tori pulled the broken helmet already on her head off, and when it was off, she realized through her peripheral that he'd turned back around and was walking away again. She looked up after him, wishing he wouldn't be always walking away. "Flint."

He paused, half-turning to see her.

She straightened, and casting the ruined helmet away, walked after him, the replacement in hand. When the gap was closed, she hooked a hand over the upper chest armor he wore, and put a kiss on his visor. Letting go, she moved past him, and toward the same stair he'd been heading for a moment ago.

Flint stood still for a moment, seeming to study the little mark she'd left on his visor. Finally, several seconds after she was long gone down the steps, he reached up and wiped the spot until it was gone. Shaking his head in bemusement, he turned towards those steps and descended them after her.

.

November 29, 2559

Bright and early, the world seemed to hold its breath. All of the city held still, as if watching, waiting to see what would happen next; the silent, stealthy filtering of Marines armed for combat exercise heading through the twilight of dawn granted some small measure of focus to this outlook. An outer patrol was passed without ever alerting it to the presence of the Humans, but only for the purpose of their checking back and failing to note the actual direction of the assault unit.

Just a few days had passed since Frank's men had blended into the remainder of the 44th battalion, a paltry one company's worth of men – roughly two hundred and eleven men. For the day's operations, a justified half of the available forces had been taken. All of Frank's remaining men and half of Lieutenant Zane's. They had divided into fire teams of four and six and proceeded through the city toward an obtuse angle of attack.

Once past the initial wave of Brute patrols, the misinformation war began. The first patrol to fall went down whisper-quiet without a single shot fired. Flint took out the backmost Grunt first, knife-only, and when there was only the leading Brute officer left, the death-kick of his companion Brute alerted him to turn about and notice his flank was entirely empty. A heartbeat later, the Spartan dropped onto him from the alley where he'd gone, and the Brute went down in a spray of bright, hot red blood straight out of his lacerated throat.

Straightening as he sheathed the combat blade at his shoulder, the Spartan touched the comn. "Team one, check."

Just a heartbeat after his words registered on the radio, the telling rattle of expending ammunition lit up a boulevard several blocks away, and a second patrol was wiped out in a matter of seconds.

The radio toggled directly as the last bullet fired stopped echoing; "Team two, check."

By the time the words came out, the Spartan was nolonger where he'd been a moment ago. The men were moving fast, and the mission clock was running. The operations for the day were not meant to last more than a few hours. Longer, and the prolonged engagement would cost them ammunition and lives. It might well also destroy their fallback route.

A full minute after the first patrol was killed, an Elite stepped out of a dark alley, sword lit, and knifed the lead Brute of a third in half; as his trailing troopmates jumped in disarray, more Elites appeared around them and cut them down, the telling snarl of sword-energy meeting with armor and flesh the only sound. As the last patrol member fell, the lead Elite touched the comn node on the side of his helmet and said, "Team three, check."

Ahead of all of them and out to the south of the moving formation of Marines and Elites with a band of four Marines of her own, Tori-138 hooked out of a side-street and around the corner of the intersection right into the snout of the lead Brute of a fourth patrol. Catching the alien by the slack jaw it sported in surprise at her sudden appearance, she embedded her combat knife into its belly at the base of the solar plexus and lifted the entire beast right off the ground.

Using every ounce of augmented strength she owned, Tori hefted the Brute over her head, then levered him forward into the reacting Brute to the first one's flank. Spike rifle rounds knifed through the thrown Brute's midsection as the two crashed together, but the display had sent all the Grunts in the patrol into utter disarray, and all of them had turned and fled with their arms waving in terror.

Each was quickly picked off with a single magnum round to the head by the Marines bringing up the backside of the patrol in front of Tori. Failing to offer the second Brute any time at all to recover, the Spartan-II bounced forward, dropped a boot onto the first Brute's chest, and leveled her rifle past it at the head of the second. Even as it fought to wrest free its weapon, she unloaded her clip into the alien's face, until it was, beyond question, dead where it lay.

Looking up past the gore at the rest of the scattered patrol, then at her Marines, Tori toggled her comn and said, "All teams, go, go, go."

.

November 29, 2559

Within minutes, forces from deeper within the patrolled area had begun to form up and respond to the attack. First the lack of reports from the outer patrol lines, then the unmistakable sound of Human weaponry told a bold tale of what was happening. Getting the New Covenant forces out in such small numbers made them easy to pick off, especially for Marines who were embittered by being forever cornered and overwhelmed.

Frank knew that there were two reasons why Flint had allowed Tori to head a team of men by herself; the first was because she was irritated again at Flint. The second was because she seemed to be hyper today – for some reason, she'd appeared to be bouncing on her toes, something even Frank found unusual. Flint wasn't dragging like the Marines were, but he was more conservative with his expressions and he certainly didn't _actually_ bounce on his toes.

Tori had quite literally done just that… and when Frank had tried to get her to fight a line beside her fellow Spartan for once, she'd about bitten his head off. Flint had put the back of a hand against his chest when she'd stalked off, preventing him from giving her a piece of his ranking mind about that, but when they had finally gotten moving, he'd noticed she wasn't bouncing anymore.

If Flint had said something to her, Frank didn't know. But whatever the real relations between those two, he wasn't sure he'd really want to. While nobody he'd spoken to had ever actually heard any arguments between the Spartans, he was still certain they had them. And he wasn't convinced in the least that they didn't reduce to fists at least half that time… he wasn't paying it quite as much mind anymore, but he still knew when Flint got after it with something.

Somehow, there always remained a measure of cohesion, despite how Tori's permanent state of out-of-line behavior couldn't seem to be fixed. No amount of correction – or fistfights – seemed to ever straighten her out. And if a fellow Spartan-II couldn't pound some sense into her, then no rank-wielding non-augment could ever hold a chance in hell of accomplishing anything either. Tori was a working enigma… how she'd ever gotten ONI to give her combat armor when she clearly was not rated for combat he'd never know.

Still, despite her spat at the start of the day, the mission – even the part assigned her – seemed to be going smoothly. So far, so good. The Brutes were convinced of their direction of assault, and they were responding accordingly. He issued a squadron's worth of men up a side street to cordon off pressure in that direction, before following the remainder forward straight into the fray. For the moment, all was going well. No casualties, and they already well and truly held the enemy's attention. It was also not focused in the direction of their current base of operations, and the shelling of their immediate flank was about due to start.

Let them waste their artillery munitions, Frank thought grimly. Hopefully, the artillery teams wouldn't get a lucky shot and take out an actual target. As the first mortar screamed past overhead, he watched it fly and felt assured that no such thing would happen today… at least not right away. If the Brutes thought the Marines had come at them in a straight line, Frank was willing to let them. All the better to throw off their aim. Still, now the real fighting had started, it was time to focus. Ensuring he had a round chambered and several magazines at the ready to replace the one in the gun, Frank looked ahead as the first alien came into sight. Shouldering his rifle at the alien from around the corner of his cover – a long-since dead car – Frank dropped his dominant hand off the trigger and balanced the gun between the forward grip and his shoulder. Aliens filtered into range all across the street downrange, weapons up, tracing back and forth seeking targets they couldn't see. Tucking the hand behind his back, Frank tucked his thumb and began to flip in each finger until none were left.

The instant his hand touched the grip of his rifle, the firefight began. From the right, tucked around behind what had once been a mailbox, Corporal Dimitri opened fire first, the rounds from his DMR immediately claiming the life of a pair of Jackals who had been unfortunate enough to be perfectly lined up when he took the shot. The bullets tore out the entire muzzle of the first and shattered the skull of the second, collapsing that fragment of the forward rank into disarray.

Frank didn't give them time to recover, carefully picking Brutes out and hitting the monstrous aliens with a single round from his 99D-S2 AM sniper rifle in quick succession. Right behind him came a hail of MA5B rounds and concentrated bursts of BR55 fire, and punctuating his second shot with a first, Private Hansen followed each sniper shot with one of his own. The Brutes went down as selected, hit by first one sniper and then the other, keeping crossfire and wasted rounds in already dead aliens to a minimum.

The system failed only after the Brutes' own responding rain of plasma, spikes and needles shattered the car Frank had hidden himself behind, and Hansen was left to hammer back the big creatures by himself while the Master Sergeant scrambled for better cover.

Somewhere in the din, someone found the time and space to throw a fragmentation grenade into the faire, and the Brutes' front line broke apart. Jackals and Grunts scattered to the sides and rear, leaving the few remaining Brutes to retreat or be left to the slaughter. On either flank would be a team of Marines carrying heavier gear, and on the flanks of those teams would be a Spartan each. Frank didn't expect the aliens would go far.

Rather than charging up the middle of the streets after them, Frank and his squadron sorted through the buildings themselves, optimizing the use of the cover for all it was worth. No sense handing the Brutes any free hits if they'd had the brains to install sniper cover for fallback insurance, after all. Frank only hoped no crafty Jackals found Hansen while the majority of the men were otherwise occupied. Perched in the fifth floor of a building up the street, the Private had only Granger and Magrasse to look after him. While Frank had little doubts about Magrasse's ability to get them out before things got tight, he still wasn't too sure if the three would be able to hold their own if they got tight anyway, despite everyone's best.

Even Frank had been cornered once or twice, in his long and not-so-glorious career, after all. And if his nerves served him, then so too had Flint. Even supersoldiers got smacked once in a while.

Hopefully, this time their luck would hold.

As the New Covenant forces fell back, and his own forces advanced, Frank made sure no equipment was left behind as they moved. Never shy about wanting more ammunition, and most of the men being well capable of the use and care of Covenant arms, the fallen enemy were soon enough stripped of all things useful, including the Jackal's wrist-shields.

Feeling shy on sniper ammunition already, even though he had another twenty shots easily, Frank made sure he got a good Covenant substitute when the men divvied their spoils quickly before the next press. Right behind them would be Vy'atree and his Elites. Getting everyone sorted and properly equipped on the fly, Frank touched bases with his own flanks once to ensure all was well with them too; while the radio was compromised as hell, it couldn't hurt to check to be sure they were _there_, and under the circumstances, the enemy were likely more concerned with their own radio chatter than any of his.

Getting rammed into and pushed back from their own established line had probably stepped on some toes, though, and Frank wasn't willing to bet he'd made as much of a dent as he thought. That artillery was still there, after all… some of it was probably just Wraiths air-lifted onto the tops of buildings, and used as stationary emplacements. If they could be taken out – or taken away – then Frank intended to ensure that they were. Stripping the enemy of the firepower was more important than gaining it for themselves, though, and he wasn't about to risk the lives of his men trying to secure one without destroying it.

Ultimately it wasn't worth it. Off to one side, he heard the telling thrum of rockets detonating, and adopted a half-snarl, half-grin. The Brutes had figured out they were being struck by a very wide hammer, this time around, and the Marines weren't going to be easily flanked and cut off.

Pushing forward, Frank saw the spaghetti bowl and immediately heeled; trying to run through that mess of overpasses and underpasses would have quailed any conqueror, he was sure, but chasing fleeing enemy through it did not sound appealing in the least. Best to avoid it altogether until and unless it came to that. Still, the majority of the aliens had fled down the main artery heading north, and that road would take them right down the interstate into the heart of downtown; where doubtless the major Brute infestation had its core.

Still, that they would be running so very far back suggested many things. Testing, Frank sent a team of men ahead, attempting to scout as much as possible. When they found nothing suggesting anything more than a full-out retreat of the enemy frontline, the rest of the Marines followed the leading team in. There had to be something in there… something useful that the New Covenant wouldn't really care too much for, like a crate or two of guns or grenades. Nothing major, but something to make the effort worth it.

The venture seemed innocuous until Frank happened to glance behind him; in that single moment, he became aware of several things. First, there was a Jackal way back up the street looking back at him from behind a crumbled Kelly wall, and even as he saw the glint of the alien's sniping tool in the sunlight, he could hear high-caliber shots echoing up from behind the creature.

Hansen.

"Oh, fucking _crap_…" Frank spun back around, and diving forward to put a corner between himself and the New Covenant sniper, promptly broke the operating silence with a shout as loud as he could get it; "_FALL BACK!_" As soon as he saw men start to move, he met their momentum and pushed it faster; if they'd been successfully flanked despite the heavy weapons' teams on either side of them, and if Hansen and his spotters were under assault, then his own fragment of the day's mission was about to get squashed like a ripe melon. As the Marines began to trace their own steps, he waved them to the southern access roads; "Ess-two, move it, move it, move it!" If they could catch the elbow of one of their Spartans, they might make it far enough sideways to avoid the pincer… but that was assuming it wasn't already too late.

So much for a munitions run… and so much for hurting the enemy while they were at it!

.

November 29, 2559

Spartan-II's had been clocked at better than fifty kilometers an hour, on foot, making tracks. She knew she was faster than Flint, though that was likely by virtue of her being slightly taller – just a couple of inches – and having longer legs. She'd never truly matched that speed against the relativistic nature of that which was around her until just then; darting across the intersection sidelong of the firefight she and her Marine escort had encountered, she thought for certain that her shields flickered in protest not for shots aimed at her, but for shots aimed and fired long ago and meant for others.

Coming across the four-lane street and the median in the middle fully to punch the joint out of the elbow between the Brute and the Marine he'd caught took her less than a full second to accomplish. But traveling a little under a mile in about a minute was certainly quick. The Brute's arm shattered completely apart, skin and muscle ripping cleanly in two as the bones broke apart like shrapnel from an exploding grenade. The Marine dropped back, hitting the concrete sidewalk as if he were already spent, the Brute spiraling away from the impact site as if suffering from outwardly traveling concentric lines of inertia. Tori hit the wall with both feet, ran up two and a half strides and flipped back over the turning Brute's head to come out behind it yet again even as it tried to recover from the sudden and traumatic loss of its arm. When she extended the same hand she'd used to punch its elbow in two, she felt her fingers dig through the armor plating over the back of its neck, leaving significant divots for each armored fingertip.

The Brute arched backward at the assault, and began a howl that cut off when she brought her other hand down around in front of it, hammering the larynx flat against the musculature of the neck. Sound cut off from it within a juicy gurgle, but a quick knee-ankle bump to the side sent the alien spinning back into the street and into the line of direct fire. Plasma seared the Brute's uncontested shields, strangely inactive until that moment. Finishing her kicking motion to turn herself back around, Tori reached down, caught the crumpled Marine, and twisted immediately around the corner.

She put the dazed man down there, satisfied in that she'd seen him pick his own head up. That meant he was alive; if he was still alive enough to raise his own head after having the Brute jerk him out of cover by his throat, then he'd be fine. It wasn't as if he'd taken a chestful of bullets, after all. Rotating back around the corner of the building into the street again, rifle up, aimed downrange. Again her shielding flared up, but the lines of agitated electricity snaking across in front of her lasted only a moment, and as soon as it had passed, she focused on target.

Rounds tore through the Grunt on the left, a well-aimed three-round burst took the face off the next one over. As the shielding of the Brute down there with them finally died, Tori filled the hairy alien with half her magazine to put it down, then switched to a Jackal someone had just spun out of balance. She ducked sideways into a turning trot as she plucked the old magazine out of the rifle, switching it easily with the next, full magazine in the pouches at her waist.

As she slammed that one into the gun and racked the slide to chamber the first round, Tori wondered if her situational symmetry weren't what Flint did every mission as a matter of course. Maybe, if she could imitate this odd fluidity again, she could possibly someday be as good at it as he was.

And maybe she was finally remembering all those years of combat training she'd managed to forget. It had been thirty years, after all… surely some slack should be afforded for thirty years of rust and dust. Just when she thought she was understanding the machinations of the firefight, a Marine appeared downrange, and she almost shot him.

The mental hiccup to end all mental hiccups dropped her right out the bottom of her state of combat awareness, and she raised her head from the sights of her rifle, dropping her aim to think aloud, "What the fuck?"

To her flank, she heard a Marine echo her word for word.

Out from the side, hammering into the New Covenant forces downrange until they were none, two squadrons of Marines all came pelting hell for leather up the feeder street as if fleeing something very big and very bad. She recognized one of them – Frank. To his right rear came a man with a rocket tube on his back, suggesting he'd already run through the heavy weapons team set up between her and where Frank was supposed to have been.

Which meant the ribbon had been cut and they needed to get the hell out before it got set on fire and reduced to ash. Thankfully, none of her own team actually _did_ shoot any of the newcomers, and when Frank's motley group ran at them, most of them picked up and joined the retreat, though still aimed more or less in the same direction.

"Move it, move it!" Frank issued, on his way past the Spartan.

"What have we got, Sergeant?" Tori responded, turning on a hip to run sideways after the lot of them, and still keep her rifle pointed downrange.

"They flanked us – I don't know how, we'll figure it out later! Just keep moving, they're right behind us!" the Marine answered. True to his words, a line of Grunts rounded the far bend in the street, guns up, their little feet flying as they pursued the Marines.

Tori wondered how many Grunts it took to make a Marine run away as she shot the first four dead, then figured it didn't matter when a pair of Jackals turned up flanked by a pair of Hunters, and then three Brutes. Cannon fire scorched lines of brackish char into the pavement around them as the men jumped clear, the first two shots from the worm symbiotes somehow failing to cause any damage at all to anyone. Shooting at them to make them stop shooting at her Marines, however, only earned Tori the full brunt of the next shot.

Impact shattered her shields, and the persistence of the lancing line of fire scorched the exterior of her Mark IX, superheating the exterior of her armor until she felt she might cook within it. Before she could, though, the pressure of the continuous fire finally pushed her off her feet, and the last little bit of that shot sailed on overhead as she toppled.

"_Tori_! Someone grab the Spartan! Gimme a hand!"

Within the flurry of hands grabbing ahold of her, Tori almost couldn't have gotten back up on her own even if she'd tried. Once pried upright, though, she managed to push most of them away. "I'm okay, I'm okay." She issued, still blinking away the heat inside her helmet. "Keep moving."

She got the words out, though… but only just. A heartbeat later, her world went black and she sagged right back to the paved ground atop a dozen reaching Marines.

"_Shit_ not now!" Frank cursed, frantically waving several men to the side to try to distract those Hunters. Now certainly was not the time to lose their Spartan. Hopefully she wasn't dead. He'd heard far too many tales of combatant troops surviving fatal injury right up until they paused their fighting to take stock of their surroundings. Such a circumstance would be highly likely for a Spartan, given what they'd been built for. She would think she was okay, because she didn't know any better until it was too late.

.

**November 29, 2559**

The snipers up high were doing their best to take care of the stationary guns' operators, but while the Grunts were being slaughtered, the Brutes seemed to take this as cue to become ingenious. When a Jackal had fallen dead, one of the hairy aliens had snatched its little arm-shield, and affixed that to the top of his helmet. How he got it to stay Flint could never guess – the last time he'd seen a Brute helmet up close, it was pretty much a smooth metal cup roughly the shape and size of the head it was stuck onto. Nothing like a bracelet was going to stick to something like that.

But with the snipers unable to peg through that arm shield, and the rifle fire from the sides more or less insufficient to break his body shield when he took to nodding in their direction during firing, the stationary gun he'd taken up was tearing them apart.

Flint wondered briefly what Frank would do, then decided to wonder about it later and come up with his own solution. At any rate, if they all survived this mess, he could always just ask the next time he saw the man. Throwing his rifle over his shoulder to lock it into place against the armor on his back, the Spartan-II began gathering up all the grenades in proximity that he could see. Once he had plenty enough to be a wondrous hazard to anyone anywhere near them – including himself, he noted with some bemusement – he peeked around the corner of the ruined structure he'd taken cover behind. He ducked away from it again almost immediately when chunks blew away from it anew, the Brute gunner having a keen eye and a good judge of whom needed to be eliminated first.

But the peek had told Flint several things; the arm-shield had begun to glimmer a rosy fuchsia, meaning it was just about to crack and fold away. This would leave the Brute in question susceptible to all that directed fire he was currently just shrugging right off. But that Brute in particular nolonger held the intersection by himself. More of the same, with several dozen more Grunts, and most importantly, a Hunter-pair, had joined him and were giving all kinds of interesting hell to the Marines Flint had come with.

Listening to the patterns of fire gave him a pretty good notion of where those enemy forces were, but their behavior was odd to say the least. Leaving them to whatever machinations they thought they were up to likely wouldn't spawn anything good later on.

Flint began jerking pins out of the grenades at his feet, and when he felt he'd done as many of them as he could, he scooped them up two and three at a time and curled out from his cover to fling them straight at the first targets he saw. Each got cluster-bombed to hell and back, the grenades sometimes detonating shy of ground fall. Bits and pieces of enemy bodies and equipment flew apart, some without a chance to scream before their demise. Others tried to flee flat out, only to be caught with their backs turned, and that one pesky Brute with the stupid-looking hat got himself swept right off his turret and splashed against the pavement.

Only the last one – and Flint made a mental note to keep much better track of which ones he yanked out first and which ones he yanked out last – actually went off a bare ten feet from the Spartan, but while it dropped him back, that was all it did. He watched as his agitated shielding returned, and he picked himself back up, pulling down the rifle as he stood.

Examination of the enemy side of the intersection left him and the remaining Marines with one wounded Brute, three disoriented Grunts, and one of the Hunter-pair left to worry about. Most of all, that gun the Jackal-shield-wearing Brute had been holding was now a shredded piece of scrap metal. It wouldn't be a problem anymore.

Almost at once, the Marine's fire consolidated on the remaining forces, cutting each down neatly and within what sounded like a magazine's worth of ammunition. Once the intersection looked clear, though, the telling click and rattle of magazines being exchanged was almost unanimous across the Human line. The detail made Flint grin, amused. Chinning the comn in his helmet on, he asked, "Are we clear?"

"Copy that, sir, barring all the bodies," a sniper team responded. "Should we buckle up or bug out?"

"What's our head-count, people? Who did we lose?" Flint asked, turning to look over the rubble behind him, peppered as it was with the Marines who were using it as firing positions. He couldn't see most of them outright, but his motion tracker assured him they were there.

The fire-teams checked in one by one, reporting one or two lost, and one got to do the honors for a couple of fire teams that had gotten wiped completely out. When it was done, Flint did a rough calculation in his head and then shook it. There wasn't enough men left to really accomplish much beyond a recon probe at this point… and even that would be somewhat risky. Time to pull out.

"Pack it up, people, head back to base. I don't like the look of things, so keep them loaded and shouldered… and move fast."

There was a little bit of grumbling, but only a little, and when the confirmation of the command came back, Flint stood still to watch as the Marines pulled out. Checking the ammo counter in his own gun, he considered probing alone – he'd certainly have less to worry about if he got flanked – then decided ultimately that it would be unwise. If the Brutes truly had the manpower to push the way they'd been pushing, then getting anywhere near their core would be a very bad move. It was unusual to have such a massive NC presence on a planet, though, and have that presence not doing much of anything.

It merited investigation… but if even half of what was implied by the enemy's maneuvering behaviors were true, then such an investigation would maybe get in, and if quick about it, report out, then be found and squashed flat. And that would cost them in lives they were running quickly out of to begin with.

Flint turned and followed the Marines' retreat, mulling that over. Maybe he could get Tori to cooperate for an op, and go in for that confirmation with her. The odds of him getting in and out alive were doable, but not great. If he had Marine backup, he'd probably wind up losing every last one of them, and likely getting his Mjolnir destroyed for him if he managed somehow not to die with them. But if he had Spartan backup, he just might increase the odds of mission success just enough to actually get in, get it done with, and get back out again without actually losing anybody.

But that supposed that Tori knew a damn thing about combat, which she really didn't… she'd been learning as she went, and under the circumstances, that just wasn't really enough. A year, or two, of in-field experience, with a time-delay of thirty years between that and combat training, just wasn't enough to solidify any faith in her ability to execute such a high-risk mission.

Maybe it was best to keep thinking, and find some other solution.

Maybe if he could get Elite backup…?


	11. Don't Give Up On Me

**11: DON'T GIVE UP ON ME**

November 30, 2559

The sun wasn't even up yet, and already that terrible gut-wrenching feeling had again beset the Marine Master Sergeant. It was practically the only feeling he knew wasn't the fault of his connection to his twin – it was his instincts telling him he was about to get pounced on.

Never once had it failed to be true – which would have suggested it was Flint about to get pounced on, had it ever been. Frank knew better than to dismiss the feeling, though, and he got his men mobilized and skirting open spots as quickly as he could. Thankfully, Tori had come back around some four hours after dropping, and while the damage to her armor was significant, it wasn't enough to actually break it. She was walking on her own, which aided in their stealth. Rambling along through the dark on the decrease of Fargo's moon without the aid of flashlights made for a lot of stumbling accidents, though for the most part the men with nightvision goggles tried to keep those who didn't well enough informed. This system wasn't terribly efficient, but it kept those unfortunate enough to not have good nightvision on their own from running their noses into a shadowed wall.

Frank could see… sort of. He had no idea what he was stepping on, no idea what half the shapes he could discern truly were, and no idea how much of each shape was actual object and how much was just shadow; but he handed off his goggles to a man with black eyes anyway, because that particular fellow couldn't even see that much.

One of the perks of being a blue-eyed O'Neil.

The arrival into the industrial park eased some of the tension – being stirred early from where they had bunkered up for some rest after the fight had set a lot of the men on edge. This minor relaxation proved the undoing of the forward line, however, when out of that unbroken dark came a phalanx of black-clad Brutes. Not a round was fired; even they could not see far enough to make shooting worth the bother. But being hacked down under the jagged blades under the muzzles of their guns permitted all six of the Marines in front to scream before it was over.

Frank saw the first muzzle flash to his left, and knew he'd gotten a stain in his vision for it. But the rest of the environment had lit up like twilight thanks to the minor glow of the bullets' departure, and as if the individual shooting had seen similarly thus, the next volley came from more than one location.

Seeing past his own muzzle flash to hit the Brute he was aiming at proved easier than he expected, but the Brutes' shielding brightly lit in protest of the impact, and equally illuminated their own immediate vicinities.

It was as if a sequence of night-lights had been set off, all down in a string. Their luminence was poor, but given what light levels the men had been staring holes through for the night thus far, it was good enough to see by. Frank took down the first Brute, then paused to look over the new fight as a whole as he reached for a fresh magazine. The shield-wearing bastards took a whole clip to put down, especially when there was no immediate assistance from other Marines aimed at the same alien.

The picture Frank saw looked incomplete… and for that matter, it looked very ominous. Tori appeared in the dim spray of muzzle-flashes off to his right, darting from cover towards the first fallen Brute. When she got there, she knelt, and emptied her magazine into the next alien over. When that failed to kill the target, she pushed back to her feet, met the staggered beast where it had stopped, and slugged it across the mouth with the butt of her rifle hard enough to snap its neck.

Flint had mentioned something about watching out for when Tori got physical on the field. Frank made a mental note of that event, then turned his own aim to assist a fellow Marine down the street who was putting bullets into a Brute charging his position. Two others pitched in before the alien went down, but it still gurgled and tried to crawl forward anyway until the guy he'd charged at stepped up out of cover and shot him in the head.

Brutes were coming out from everywhere… had they tracked Frank's dispatch, and circled around them to cut them off? Were they already here, and lying in wait for Frank's return? Were the men left behind in the warehouse even still alive, or had they been routed and slaughtered by this enemy unit? Where was Flint and his team?

Just as he'd finished the thought about the other Spartan, he felt something impact the back of his shoulder, the event sending his next shot entirely wild and causing him to need to duck when the rounds ricocheted off the wall overhead and came back to get him. "Gah!"

For a heartbeat he thought it had been the source of his thought – Flint engaged in combat again – but his duck got him twisted around enough to realize the shadow behind him had gotten a lot bigger… and mobilized. Without waiting to see what it would do or even what it was, Frank ducked forward over his own knees and leapt nimbly sideways past the black spot, catching false bricking across one arm and stumbling over it instead of finishing his jump.

He heard the irritated huff of a Brute as feet shuffled in a pirouette motion, so he twisted back around and brought the muzzle of his BR up to address the issue. Muzzle flash never happened, as he hadn't gotten the trigger depressed before the barrel's end was covered by a monkey paw, concealing anything of the kind. There was an unmistakable sound of shredding meat and bone and the splash of liquid striking a flat surface, and a moment later, he felt the outer edge of a spike rifle blade smash into the false bricking just a hair's breadth from his ribs.

It had torn right through the flak jacket he wore, and he was now stuck on the end of those knives… or one of them, anyway.

The Brute howled in pain for whatever had happened to its grasping hand, but when it jerked the blades back out, Frank pretended to crumple. Maybe it wouldn't "make sure" he was dead quickly enough to stop him from skirting the issue entirely. But if he wasn't an "immediate threat" anylonger – hence the ruse – then perhaps it would, in fact, hesitate just a moment to address that hand.

His luck held, and the Brute backed off, allowing Frank to get his feet back under him. The first thing he did was flick the flashlight under his gun on; the second thing he did was splash the light it emitted right into the Brute's face, blinding the absolute crap out of the alien and causing it to stagger backward, squinting, with a dismayed, irritated yowl.

Frank squeezed the trigger, blowing a three-round burst into the Brute's open maw. Instantly the alien jumped backward, hit the signpost behind it and spun about, dropping straightaway to the paved sidewalk and staying there. A heartbeat after it looked dead enough to leave alone to Frank, it emitted a low whine of escaping air, startling the Marine all over again and sending him sprinting for some other place to be.

If that Brute got back up, Frank did not want to be around to witness it. As he ran, he noticed that wherever he pointed his flashlight, he illuminated more and more enemy, and the responding fire from his men doubled. After noticing a hauler rig up ahead would be a good place to stop, Frank swept the light across the enemy side of the street one more time, then flipped the light off and dove for it. Sure enough, the point where his light had gone out was soon filled with blind-flying ammunition from the Brutes' side, punctuated at the end by a well-aimed plasma grenade.

He flipped over the other side of the abandoned rig's flatbed for that one.

"Watch your flanks! They're behind us too!" Frank yelled over the din, aiming the shout more or less into the spot where he was sure he was seeing MA muzzle flashes.

Barely had he said as much then he heard someone else scream in agony, and a heartbeat after, one of his guns went quiet.

_Damn_, he thought, trying to pinpoint where that had been. He found the doorless entrance on the side of the building the hauler was parked in front of, and when he stepped inside, he saw another shadow move; that one he didn't have time nor ability to identify before it had closed the gap, and grabbed him.

"Hey…" said the shadow, evidently able to recognize what it was holding even if it couldn't see it. "You're Human."

"That's you're Human, _sir_, to you." Frank groused, shoving the other man off of him. "Thanks for not shooting."

"Oh… uh… sorry, sir. I was trying to watch our flanks… been snuck up on by three of the bastards already. I couldn't really see what you were, sir."

"Like I said," Frank told him, moving for the grenade-hole in the wall off ahead, to the left of the doorway. "Thanks for not shooting. Where is everyone? What direction did these guys come from first? Do we know _anything_ besides that we're well and truly fucked right now?"

"Sorry, sir… I don't have any answers."

November 30, 2559

Vy'atree heard the human weapons' fire before he saw it, or even any sign for why he'd be hearing it. But he'd been seeing sign of enemy passage through the area and felt his suspicions were well and truly justified now… the enemy truly had been through here, and now their passage had gotten them caught by the Humans' watchful eyes.

Or so he hoped. More realistically, he supposed the two parties had found each other simultaneously, and clashed in startled alarm more than anything else. Shaking his head at the thoughts, Vy'atree motioned the Elites at his flanks to alter their direction; if he didn't intervene, the Humans would come out by far more the worse for wear, if they came out at all.

Moving silently and swiftly, the Elites all turned and closed in on the sound, none needing any especial directing given that the firefight had yet to cease. Now the lower-toned staccato of Brute weaponry could be heard, and in the pitch of night, every one of the warriors were wondering how either of the other two species could see a damn thing.

Even for Elites, tonight was a dark night. Not too much to see in, not at all – but dark enough to confuse shapes and shadows on the fly.

Even the rear flank of the Brutes swarming in on the Human position was visible, however, the smallest of reflective surfaces on their armored hides catching and turning the dim starlight and outlining their otherwise shadowed forms as more than just formless shapes. With the ignition of the front rank of swords, this lighting situation changed dramatically. Brilliant and white-hot, the swords chewed through the turned backs of over a dozen Brutes before any of them even realized their flank was under assault. While luminous, the swords' agitated sizzles were silent as ghosts under the drumbeat of weapons' fire.

'Kaskindee caught the first comrade to be felled under a bristle of red-hot spikes, though he admittedly caught the warrior more to stop his death throes from slicing 'Kaskind into little pieces with the lit sword in his hand.

Lifting the weapon without deactivating it, he let the dead fall to the pavement, and left him there. Less engaged Elites could strip him of usefuls later; for now, 'Kaskind was in the fore of an attacking spearpoint, and he needed to be a productive member of it.

Spying Vy'atree out ahead, 'Kaskindee sprinted to catch up, keeping an eye out for any enemy that might have gotten missed. He saw Vy'atr turn around partway to address a Brute pelting his shields with red plasma, and another appeared out of the darkness on the Elite's other side.

He thought he would bring the bladed side of his grenade launcher up under Vy'atree's trailing arm, but instead his focus on his intended prey cost him both hearts and part of a lung when 'Kaskind struck from his flank and brought him down under the sword he held. He was straightening up from the pounce when Vy'atree turned back to see him, a look on his face that puzzled 'Kaskind and made him pause.

A moment later, Vy'atree raised his Carbine and put a round into 'Kaskindee's shields, knocking his unbalanced posture over. Only once he'd hit the pavement on his back and looked up by the light of his sword did he understand why; another Brute stood where had been behind him, now over him. His over-reaching swipe with the bladed fronts of his spike rifles was cut short when the Elite shaved both arms off at the elbow, and rolled quickly to the side to regain his hooves.

Before he was fully stood again, though, Vy'atree had silenced the Brute's pained howl with several well-aimed shots from his Carbine, and was already moving on. As he stepped to follow, 'Kaskind vowed to pay better attention; he felt his Superior was quite within his rights to shoot him once for being so negligent… that he'd used the same motion to make him see his err before it was too late to correct again was doubtless a kindness.

Still, the sheer number of Brutes here was alarming. Where were their minions? Where were their swarms of Kig-yar and Unggoy? He had just finished these thoughts when four of the other Elites on the same street passed him up and veered left, and in glancing at them 'Kaskind missed the upswing of the grenade launcher's bladed stock.

Vy'atree shot down the Brute immediately in front of him, and was forced to slug the one assaulting his flank with a fist to gain any kind of room. He leapt sideways and struck a hoof onto the wall of the building on that side, rebounded from it and came back to the Brute he'd punched. He brought down the butt-end of the Carbine he held across the alien's face, smacking it aside and forcing the Brute to twist into a drop. Once he was flat, Vy'atr reached down and jerked out the activation tabs on the grenades on the bandolier he wore, before abandoning him completely.

Failing to realize his doom straightaway, the downed Brute got back up, the sharply glowing plasma grenades at his chest hidden briefly as he charged after his escaping prey by all the crossfire of flashing lights. Bullets caught him from that crossfire, stalling out his momentum briefly, but when he exploded, he had no idea why.

Vy'atree spared a moment then to look back the way he'd come, noting the positions of most of his Elites. He could only see five; four of those were sprawled across the dark pavement, including the nearest one. He crooked his mandibles and raised his lip in a snarl, but he didn't stay long. Twisting away almost instantly, he extended his stride up the street heading for the nearest source of Human rifle fire. This morning was perhaps the bloodiest of them all, and more questions had arisen than answers.

A Human perhaps twice too big to be any of the Marines intercepted him abruptly, and caught himself before he smacked Vy'atree in the mandibles with the gun in his hands.

"Oh, you're… where are the others?" The voice corrected the small error; this was the female Demon.

"We must disengage and retreat; we are being slaughtered like vermin without honor in this place." Vy'atree snarled in reply. "Make your people move."

"Damn… I was beginning to think I was seeing too many Brutes and not enough of the other little bastards around."

"There are _none_." Vy'atree informed her. "This is a special task force, and you will not find any of the other races here tonight. Get your Marines in retreat immediately, Demon, or you will very soon have none left."

"Yeah, sure, done. Come on, let's follow them out." She started moving, adding after, "Or help punch an opening to go out through."

The screaming wail that lit the night like a shooting sun – too close to merely be a star in the sky – averted all eyes from their current tasks, however, and very shortly the shouting outmatched the shooting, and all the Humans began to pick up and run for it.

As one, the Brutes they had been shooting at lit after them, chasing several down and shooting them or beating them to death as each was caught. The Elites reconsolidated as the Human forces began to stream out the north end of the engagement, mixing into their number. Several on the flanks and in the rear ran backwards or sideways, shooting at their pursuit while simultaneously hoping to evade the sudden arrival of plasma artillery.

The whole sky was filled with it, and buildings were coming down all over the place.

Out ahead, Frank couldn't anylonger even hear himself shouting, the noise level was so great. Exploding, crumbling buildings, the crashing impact of building pieces striking street level, the thunderous, shattering impact of a plasma shell hitting the open street and throwing a crater out of the pavement, all of it… the rain was so heavy and constant that it had lit up the night sky like midday, and the prattle of hand-held weaponry was entirely gone from the sound palette. Marines were darting this way and that, running hell for leather forward, sideways, sometimes going down a side street and up a block only to come running back again to evade what they'd found in that other street.

There was just nowhere to go that was safe from the reaching hand of the artillery, even with the Spartan pacing their six and helping with the Elites to keep their pursuit of purely Brutes from swarming over them.

Frank felt distraught; he wasn't seeing nearly enough men, and if this was all that remained of the Elite dispatch sent out yesterday, then that was a sad state of affairs, as well. Even at a glance, he thought for certain he'd been cut by _half_… which would leave him less than a hundred men total.

That was if he glanced with hope, instead of despair. He threw his arms up to shield his face when the building to his immediate left took a hit, and false bricking peppered across him like pellets from a shotgun blast. The bigger chunks came out next, less than a heartbeat behind the little ones, riding the actual pressure wave the explosive shell had generated. A chunk as big as his thigh smacked across his leading shoulder, spinning him out and dropping him into an involuntary roll under the leaping boots of another Marine.

That one got four strides farther and went down under a man-sized chunk, but the man directly behind them both stooped as he ran and hauled Frank back to his feet. His mouth was moving, but Frank couldn't hear a damn thing but thunder anylonger. That building was shooting shrapnel and dust all over hell and gone, which meant it was coming down on them, and if he didn't keep running, he'd be buried. He moved his legs, attempting to do just that, but if the other Marine ever let go of him, he knew he'd only go back down to the pavement again. He wasn't sure why… he only knew he'd been hit across the shoulder, nowhere else.

But one thing he did know acutely – if all of them didn't find somewhere else to be really fast, not a one of them was going to make it through the day.

.

November 30, 2559

The attempt to back out while the getting had appeared good soured almost as fast as pouring lemon juice into a glass of milk. Flint knew better than to push his luck; they still had ammunition, and for the moment, the Brute front looked abandoned. No one would suspect them to go _inward_ to go around that surprise wall of troops and artillery pieces they'd run into.

Outward was too hammered-looking to provide much cover, and too likely to contain stationary scout troops to tattle on them if they tried it. But inward looked like it had been cleared out by the advancing maneuver… which meant it would be a hell of a closing pincer trap if it closed before they were ready for it to.

Given his choices, Flint felt annoyed, but he took it. Open for part of the way was better than open for none of the way, and while his Marines had ammunition, they did not have enough to sustain a heavy assault for more than half an hour.

Thirty minutes… and then they'd all die.

He hadn't heard a single whisper on the comn, not from Frank, not from Vy'atree. Nobody was squawking, even to click a preordained sequence to let everyone else know they'd returned to base safely. Dawn was in full progress, and the sky over the northeast end of the city was already pre-lit by arcing balls of contained plasma. If they had found what they thought was a Human position and were pounding it, then it was a mobile position… it was too close to be the business park. But if they'd found evidence enough to break out the artillery and lay waste to the area in general, then that might suggest why nobody had hit the all-home sequence.

They were under fire.

Flint found it rather difficult to focus… both Tori and Frank were up that direction, and likely both getting the snot pounded out of them. Frank might be able to handle it, but he'd feel it afterwards. Tori might well not come out the far side in one piece.

Not after what she'd done to her last helmet.

He kept his own dispatch of Marines moving as quickly as quiet would permit, but it still didn't feel sufficient. The closer they got to the Brutes' main base of operations, the worse it stunk, and the more Flint wished he could just light out and run for it – Spartans could run at upwards of fifty kilometers an hour. He could easily make up that small distance to the firefight northeast of his position in less than ten minutes.

But when the artillery pounding stopped, he did, too, and he stood there for almost a full minute, staring up the side street heading straight for that suddenly quiet sector of the city and waiting. He finally moved on, though, certain he'd get to do something about it later.

Probably sooner than he'd like, too, given how much ammunition he himself now carried. Trotting to catch up to the leading Marine, Flint swiveled around each time he passed a corner or somewhere that looked like it might contain a cranny for an enemy to hide in. He itched for the action to spring at them already, but he knew better than to outright wish for it. The last time he'd encountered the enemy, it had cut a significant hole in the number of Marines he had with him, after all.

Venturing so near the Brute's main base held its own temptations, however… and considering all the questions he'd collected over the course of his stay on Fargo thusfar, Flint found it hard as hell to resist them. Finally, starting the arc back north away from the center of the city, he took three of the men aside and went west with them. The rest continued north, keeping their heads down and their eyes alert; sans their Spartan escort, they felt more exposed, and would be more careful. If they didn't make it back alive, then it would be by the twisted fates of fortunes alone, and by no fault of theirs.

Knowing there were only a total of four of them made the three Marines still with Flint feel similarly; but that was okay. Flint rather appreciated a heightened sense of awareness in his support troops. Better they see it coming than not, after all. Even if he couldn't save them, he could still do something about whatever took them out before it took him out too.


	12. If I Ask Nicely

**12: IF I ASK NICELY**

December 1, 2559

There seemed nowhere to run; it was making the Marines antsy, but all were wise enough to keep still and keep their mouths shut. If even one lost his composure, his cool, he would likely condemn them all.

Flint focused on the motions of the forces ahead of him. Formidable, perhaps, but nothing he hadn't faced down before, and it made him itch knowing that those memories had included his former – and long since died off – fire team. Spartans gone to the sands of time, faces he only barely recalled anymore.

None would be here to back him up, today, when he finally found a fight he liked and pounced. Today, there was Fallon, Otto, Edgley, and Browder. Marines, one and all. Men he could look over the heads of without needing them to duck.

He missed the old days, when the thirty-three who survived augmentation had still been around.

Oh well. No help for it now.

Not as if he hadn't been out on solo ops before…

Flint focused a little closer to home, checking the expressions of the Marines at his flanks. Otto and Edgley looked grim, Fallon looked like he had a bug trapped in his ear, and Browder looked like he couldn't decide what he wanted to feel about the situation yet. For his part, though, Fallon wasn't trying to take his helmet off… yet.

It would have to do.

"Moving up." Flint told them, before breaking from the cover of the old storefront they had clumped into, and shooting across the intersection to the farthest corner, where all the windows of the next shop over had been busted out. Glass still lay in drifts and splashes across the sidewalk and much of the street, but if anything more than percussive blasting had broken it, there was no sign. No empty shells, no discarded plasma containment cubes, and certainly no burn marks or bullet scoring.

Perhaps that mess was to be found the next block up… if indeed it had not been the fault of landing a ship bigger than a Phantom aground at some point. Time ate forward, seeming to chew on each moment individually before moving to the next. Flint thought it took too long to make the distance, but hardly had he stopped at the rim and hopped through, then he saw the Marines hustle up behind him.

They were on their toes, rifles up, butts to shoulders. Eyes roved the place, barrels tracing lines hither and yon, one even going so far as to briefly aim up, through a broken hole in the ceiling. It didn't go through the floor of the above story of the building, though, so he quickly moved on, leveling his gaze.

Flint listened to the glass crunching beneath their collective boots, more grinding into smaller granules under his own titanium soles than shifting about, and wondered who else could hear it too. Beyond this city block, many of the Human structures had been leveled, and atop the drifts of rubble, old Covenant hardware had been emplaced. It was mainly this that Flint was aiming for, though he wasn't certain how deep he'd be able to get before he got caught, by intent or by accident.

Certainly, being this near that borderline was making the Marines shoot looks at the back of his head more often; it was almost amusing, the way they seemed to keep hoping he'd turn them around and get them out of here. Not one ever said as much, but the sentiment was plain enough. Even Flint wasn't certain what he'd find… or even what he was after.

He doubted he'd find much, but anything useful would be good for the flagging UNSC forces at this point. Anything at all. Even if all he could do was drag out a few thousand pounds of ready-to-use weaponry. Moving through the storefront towards that precarious line, Flint tucked a shoulder to the wall and froze for a moment as a Brute trotted quickly from the Covenant structure and headed straight down the street where Flint was concealed. Being entirely without lip at the floor, the front wall of the store was not going to conceal much once the Brute made it that far.

Flint considered his options, cast a glance back at the men, then focused forward and, MA6C shouldered, stepped out. He found his reticule empty, alarmingly, and he panned back and forth quickly before raising his head in puzzlement. Surely the Brute could not have just… vanished, could it? Figuring there was really no help for it now – and certainly if there had been anyone watching this place right then, he'd have had a fight of _some_ caliber by now – Flint waved the Marines up and sprinted straight for the Covenant structure ahead.

Barely had he gotten the first reaching boot onto the cold, purple metal than he spotted that Brute; it had evidently turned right around and gone straight back the way it had come, but now it was turning around again and facing back at Flint. Without hesitation, the Spartan opened fire, throwing the Brute backwards with the blast, and finally, felling it permanently. At his flanks, the Marines grouped up at first, then spread out once clear of the doorway.

Browder and Otto went around the cusp of the leading corridor to the right, and Edgley and Fallon hung left. Straight ahead was another narrow doorway, so Flint ducked through it, sparing the least amount of time possible to cutting the pie beyond it, tracing the line of sight with his rifle. Seeing nothing immediate, he tapped the comn. "Clear."

Fallon answered first; "Clear."

Hearing nothing from the other two immediately, Flint backtracked and headed after them. His instincts proved correct when he finally got the response; "Clear… oh _shit!_"

Evidently, the situation of all-clear had not lasted but enough time to say as much, and then it was nolonger true. Flint intruded on the scene right as Otto opened fire at point-blank range into the throat of the Brute that had grabbed him by the head, his arms and his rifle up between the alien's elbows. Beyond that, Browder had dodged quickly sideways to avoid a similar fate and curled into a spin around the leading lunge of a second Brute that had aimed at him, rifle first. Some of that spray ricocheted off the Brute's shields and again off the walls around them, but Flint didn't get to find out where they went next.

Instead he focused his sprinting momentum at the Brute in front, with Otto, and dropping the trigger of his MA, sent an uppercut into the alien's near elbow. The alien dropped the Marine straightaway as his arms sailed over his head, but even before Otto had a chance to hit the floor, Flint stuck the barrel of his MA into the Brute's protesting snarl and blew the beast's brains out from under its helmet.

Otto rocked onto a hip and scrambled quickly back to his feet, apparently unhurt for the exchange, only to bear the full brunt when Browder's assailant redirected at him and brought the bladed front of a spike rifle down through his shoulder. Around the first Brute, Flint caught the rifle-wielding arm by the wrist and jerked it out straight with his left hand. Having nothing on the trigger, he jammed the MA's barrel across the Brute's face as it overbalanced without shooting it, but once the alien made the floor, Flint caught the grips of the gun and emptied the last of the magazine into its face.

Turning back from that, Flint first glanced up the corridor, aware he'd just made quite a lot of noise, then down again at the Marines when he didn't immediately see anyone.

Browder stood from where he'd squatted at Otto's side, and shook his head. "He's dead."

"Shit fest," Fallon swore, approaching from behind the Spartan with Edgley. "Where did they come from?" he asked, gesturing at the two dead Brutes.

"Up the corridor. Appeared in the doorway when it opened." Browder explained. "We got to keep moving, Chief, they doubtless heard that."

Flint stepped past as Browder bent to pull Otto's dogtags, aware the three remaining Marines would strip the body of usefuls in seconds flat; he didn't need to wait on them. No words needed to be spared about Otto himself, either; they all knew better than to try to carry their fellow along into what could easily become a death trap, even unburdened by dead weight.

Ahead, through the door of mention, Flint looked around, noting the room was circular and tall, but occupied almost entirely by a fat cylindrical chamber down through its middle; and within that was what looked like a gravity lift. Investigating, he stepped forward far enough to peer upwards without being caught and lifted, but he couldn't see much beyond the lip of the ceiling where it met the edges of the lift's beam.

Glancing back, he saw only his remaining three Marines; no responding forces to the ruckus he'd made a moment ago. Curious. Also not very reassuring.

"We going up, Chief?" Browder asked, giving the lift a dubious look.

"We might." Flint answered, glancing about the interior of the inner circle to look for something, anything else. Nothing but the door out back the way they had come presented itself; which left nothing for it. "Yes, we're going up," he decided, and promptly stepped into the beam.

.

December 1, 2559

Dawn was finally complete, and daylight had splashed all across the city, illuminating the dour scenery for all who cared to look. Frank didn't even know how he and his band of unlucky men had gotten cleanly away, but somehow they had. Unfortunately, they were almost a mile from the warehouse base, where medical assistance could be had. The fingers of one gloved hand scratched idly at his armored vest, the frayed, torn collar and part of one shoulder pad testament to how he'd completely misplaced his dogtags and gotten the half-stripe of burned flesh stenciled across the side of his neck.

Even as he looked over the faces of the Marines – dusty white like talc, to a soul – he saw one man drop to his knees, and with little more than his gun to lean on to spare him from laying outright on the floor, he vomited blood. Two of his comrades grappled him then, one with an ugly growth of expanded biofoam jutting from a deep gash in his upper arm, the other bleeding openly from a wound through the meat of his thigh that still contained a thirteen-inch steel spike.

He looked away, out the shattered hole that had once been a window, and at the street below. The building had been abandoned mid-construction when the Brutes appeared, so there was really no telling what it had once been intended for. But it had solid stairs, and solid floors, and thick steel bracing where walls would eventually be installed, and it made a dandy place to hide. Of the twelve or so individuals who had miraculously come away unharmed, every last one was placed somewhere topside or across the street, hidden, keeping watch for unwanted visitors.

Hearing someone ask a question he missed the words to, Frank looked back, in time to see Tori – still dressed in full armor – take three unbalanced strides away from the staircase leading up to his floor, and promptly crumple at the toes of a startled Elite. His attempt to catch her on her way down failed, though he danced backward to keep from being clipped at the knees by her half-ton bulk.

Her impact sent a shudder through the floor that everyone else felt, and it brought up all eyes – even those of the man who had just given a fair impression of barfing up a lung a moment ago. He wheezed in her direction, only, tear streaks striating the dust on his face as his eyes watered for his pain.

Frank pushed to his feet, limping on what he could now tell was something wrong with that knee, and made the short distance to where the fallen S-II had crumpled. The Elite had gotten her rolled face-up, a feat perhaps only he could have managed, and three of the other Marines were tugging at the seals and latches of her armor, trying to get it to open and reveal the soldier inside.

Arriving at last on-scene, Frank looked her over, but didn't immediately see any dents or holes deep enough to have met flesh; indeed, there wasn't even any blood on her exterior that was red, though she had a nice splash of crusty orange shit all down one leg. Somehow, a Grunt had managed to gush on her as it died, and she'd never bothered to rinse it away, if she'd ever gotten opportunity to.

Finally, one of the Marines got her helmet loose, and pulled it free. He pushed a thumb under the lip of the armor over her throat, adjusting placement for a moment before settling in position over her vein, then raising his other arm and looking at the watch embedded between his glove and the arm guard.

Frank knelt, exhaling slowly as he tried not to agitate his irritated joints any more than necessary. "She alright?"

"I'm getting a steady pulse, sir…" the Marine gave a shrug, taking back his hand and putting his other arm down to look up at the Master Sergeant. "I couldn't really say." Finally, the other two gave up on the rest of the armor, and left it alone, sitting on their heels instead to look across at the one who'd just spoken.

Frank took the top of Tori's head in one hand, and turned it for her, first this way, then that, frowning. "Head injury, maybe? Blunt trauma?"

"It's possible, sir." The Marine answered, with another shrug.

"Can we measure blood pressure…? Anyone here got any kind of real medical kit at all?" Frank began, looking around at the other gathered troopers. "Be a sure bitch if we have to drag our Spartan down the street."

"I don't know, Sarge." The Marine threw up his hands. "I got biofoam, and a tourniquet, and some gauze wrap, and some hydrocolloid gel, but that's it. I'm fitted for big ugly holes, sir, not… ugh… I don't know. Blunt head trauma, or whatever."

Frank nodded, more to placate the man than anything else. "Okay."

"If she's got a head injury, she'll just have to let us know by dying here in a bit, sir, cos with all due respect, there's not a damn thing I can do to or about that shit."

"Check her pulse again in an hour or so, I guess… or sooner, if you feel the need. Otherwise… I guess all we can do is wait." Attempting to stand up got himself hauled to his feet by the Elite, who hadn't moved since rolling Tori over. There was nothing left to do or say about the current situation, so Frank tottered back the way he'd come, to where he'd piled in the corner against the outer wall in the first place.

He didn't know how many men he had left, but of the ones he could see, the lull in the action was allowing many to slow down enough to notice they were walking corpses; he tried not to watch as the one that had vomited a pint of blood choked slowly to death, even as his bloodsoaked companions tried desperately to save him.

Frank closed his eyes, and rested a gloved hand over them, as the gurgling slowly stopped, and the insistent demands that he stay with the living ceased.

There truly was nothing quite like having the shit shelled out of a body.

.

**December 1, 2559**

The utter lack of available personnel was beginning to set even Flint's teeth on edge. Though what kind of trap required allowing himself and his three Marines to get so very deep within the Brute's base of operations before pouncing upon them, he couldn't fathom. Surely, surely, any number of the chambers or corridors before now would have done just as nicely for an ambush as any out ahead.

It just didn't make any sense at all… and for all his senses were telling him, he should have been surrounded, cut off from escape, and cut down by now. His motion tracker just kept right on insisting that he was alone with his Marines, however.

Alone.

Despite being healed, the situation was making his left shoulder burn and ache as miserably as it had ever before, almost as if his physical self was trying to agree with his mental self; the level of wrongness about this situation was palpable.

Where _was_ everybody? Why had they seen no Grunts, no Jackals, no Brutes, nary a hair nor whisper of anyone or anything at all? Had the three lonely individuals they had already killed been really all there was? If so, why? Where were the base guard? Why have a base if it was to be left derelict, abandoned, empty? Better – where was Obivok, if here was not where he had retreated to, after his last run-in with Flint?

Too many questions followed him, and no answers were forthcoming. It seemed the more of the base he prowled, the less likely it seemed to be inhabited. Finally, finding a centered room that actually had something in it, the Spartan paused at a console to try to decipher its contents. He could speak Sangheilian, could read the basic old-Covenant dialect, but much of what he saw he suspected was Brute paw-scratchings, as it made no sense whatsoever to him.

When Fallon stepped up past him, Flint stepped back, allowing the Marine his chance to be useful; maybe he could manipulate the user interface despite the lingual hurdle, and perhaps find something in audio. Audio, Flint could handle.

He had translation subroutines for that.

Surprisingly, Fallon managed to do just that; he stepped away from the console again as a short audio clip played back, the Brute speaking seeming to grumble discontentedly more than the usual guttural barks and growls conveyed. When the recording finished playback, Fallon started to reach for another key when Flint reached out and caught his arm, stopping him. At a querulous look from the Marine, he elaborated, "This place is empty. But it won't be for long." Releasing Fallon's arm, he glanced at the other two. "Find good places to drop some plastic, I've a hunch we shouldn't go without leaving them gifts."

Instantly the trio dispersed, digging at their battle rattles for explosives. Once the room was dressed, and the timers had been set, Flint led the way back out the way they'd come in; that message all by itself had explained the majority of what hadn't made sense until now. Obivok was driving his Brutes unmercifully, forcing them to push the Marine forces more savagely than they otherwise would have; it had cost him greatly in forces, and by the state of the base Flint had invaded unchallenged, that cost had been pretty steep.

Still… knowing the enemy was about as ragged and thinly stretched as they were would doubtless boost morale, even if nothing else was gained of it. In the mean time, there was no sense departing the base without effecting some kind of useful change to the place; and the less that Obivok and his dwindling clan had to work with, the better.

Frank could doubtless use any edge he could get, regardless of the state of the Brute army. That truth didn't necessarily alter the state of the Marine forces.

.

December 1, 2559

Five past ten provided a sudden boost in troops; Flint's dispatch had arrived, and somehow their chosen trajectory had funneled them right under Frank's chosen resting place. Spied by his watchmen, they had been rerouted up into the half-built building, but that Flint was not among them disheartened Frank's initial cheer at their arrival.

The idiot, it seemed, had gone and done a fool thing.

Still, he'd taken pretty good care of the men he'd sent ahead, and with the boost in uninjured personnel, Frank was able to get his own flagging dispatch on its feet and in motion; beforehand, he simply didn't have enough boots capable of walking to have pulled it off, and the warehouse where they had set up their new base of operations was just too far away to try to crawl there.

That time, the Elites stayed huddled within the convoy, failing to offer to run the flanks or scouting ahead. If they had gotten themselves flayed enough for one day as well, Frank would not have been surprised. But of the ones that he supposed knew his brother, all of them looked mildly apprehensive about not knowing what the wayward Spartan was doing; or if he would wind up needing to be rescued towards the end of that unnamed task.

Progression across that last mile's breadth proved blessedly quiet, without interruption or excitement. The most dramatic thing that happened along the way was yet another of Frank's battered men collapsing at the end of his rope. The body was carried along anyway, though there was no doubt he would be abandoned just wherever if even a hint of combat presented itself. Nobody was willing to die for a lump of dead meat, not under these circumstances, even despite the UNSC's usual doctrine about fallen soldiers.

It simply wasn't worth it. Trying to collect all the bodies already dead in the city would likely cause more living to die in the attempt, and likely in droves. With Brutes still in the city, the cost was just too high to even think about it. Frank well imagined there would be a lot of picking of uniformed bones when and if the UNSC ever regained control of Fargo and its outlying systems. Tori had come to, a small miracle in a world of misfortunes, but a pair of the Elites had still needed to take an elbow each on the girl and forcibly keep her upright as they progressed towards the warehouse.

Arrival sent a palpable rush of relief Frank could literally taste in the air through the men, and soon enough the lot of them had gotten into the warehouse and spread out, the medically gifted – not necessarily medics, however – attending the wounded in any way they could.

Frank looked for any familiar faces as helmets came down from heads, but his attention followed the Spartan as she was dragged past him instead, and he followed the trio up to a corner. There, the Elites dropped her, a bit harshly by Frank's standard, but one of them said something in Sangheilian that he could have sworn sounded like an issuance of well-wishes before departing. He didn't know the language, but tone often said more than the words themselves anyway. Glancing at their departure, Frank moved up to the empty shipping crates where Tori had been perched, and sat on the one next to hers.

"How you doing?" Frank asked, turned halfway to see her. She was reclined against the wall of the warehouse, looking dead and limp for all she was draped where she sat.

Her answer came as more of a muttered slur, weariness dominating her demeanor. "Feel sick as hell."

"Sick?" Frank asked. "Brute slug you in the guts?"

"I wish." The derisive snort came out as more of a half-choked exhalation, but Frank caught the meaning anyway.

"Something I should know about?" Frank pressed.

She seemed to start a thought – it came out as "_ih_…" – then cut it off instead and rolled her helmeted head around to point the blank gold visor at him as if studying him anew. "You're identical twins, right? Genetically exchangeable?"

Frank's whole face screwed up. "Where did _that_ come from?"

"It's important, okay? I need to know." Tori answered, starting to sound a bit more animated. She did not, however, sound at all _well_.

Frank sighed, failing to fathom why such a thing would relate to current circumstances, but he nodded anyway. "Yeah, they could graft his arm onto mine if I lost one and my body'd think it was mine. Why?"

"It's… complicated." She looked away for a moment, then put her hands on the crate top at her sides and pushed until she was seated more or less upright. From there, she bowed her head and released the catches to lift her helmet away and set it beside her knee. Looking over at Frank again, she added softly, "Flint is not exactly as much of a generalist in the field as ONI would enjoy… do you know science at all?"

"Took it in high school?" Frank offered, again feeling way off track from the original thought. How many times in a row could she do this? Did she do it to Flint a lot? Was that why he claimed to not understand her at all? Her mental disconnectedness surely would explain it! "It's been a very long time. I joined the Marines at seventeen. Last bit of scientific whatnot I dabbled in was mostly data related, and that only for the purposes of stealing it from the enemy successfully."

"Okay." She seemed to give a small nod, then looked away, staring at the floor from between her armored knees. "Well, even I don't understand all of the biology of it, so trying to explain it to you without your having a basic understanding of the topic would do no good then."

"Biology…?" Frank asked, his blonde brows meeting. "I suddenly really don't like where this is going… what about my… Flint's… biology are you referring to?"

She looked back over at him, at first wearing no visible expression, though physically she looked drawn and a little pale. But immediately at seeing his expression, her face crinkled and she gave a small laugh. "You look so much like him… your expressions are so alike. It's as if you were never separated."

Frank offered part of a smile in return. "I wish."

"Your cellular hypermetabolism." She answered, returning to the former topic. "Your brother – you, possibly – are immune to every drug and disease known to man by sheer virtue of the fact that you incubate, suffer and recover from all inflictions within a matter of minutes, rather than hours or days. Under normal circumstances I'd say such a creature wouldn't live to be twenty before it burned out and died of what was basically old age, but… you two are fifty, aren't you?"

"As of the first of last month, yeah." Frank confirmed. "And I know about my hypermetabolic state. I've compounded my fair share of medics and doctors. It was nothing they could mimic for other people to partake in, so I escaped being a lab rat by that much. It's a lot like being a white boy versus a black boy. You either are or you aren't, and taking pigmentation pills really isn't going to change that."

Tori nodded, smiling at his analogy. "In this case, however, there is no such thing as a pigmentation pill. And therein lies the problem."

"So why did you want to discuss that aspect of him… us…?"

"Because your hypermetabolic state is the only known remedy to my own condition, Frank."

He blinked, certain he'd heard that wrong. "Uh… come again?"

"I don't have an immune system, Frank." Tori admitted, quietly. "Flint has been the only thing keeping me from dying of septic shock from merely having touched something and having foreign matter on, in, or near my person. He is… was… my only lifeline." She inhaled, seeming to try to steady herself against either terrible nausea or a killer headache. Frank was about ready to believe it was either one – or both. "Without the immunity boosters he gives me, I die."

Frank's gaze slowly sank past his own knees to the floor between his boots, then, and he stared at it long and hard before ultimately coming to the only undeniable conclusion he could; "He's not here, your meds have worn off, and I'm handy."

"Eight cc's, Frank, seriously. It's not like I'm asking you for a testicle or something."

Frank grinned despite himself. "Damn… I don't know if that's a nerdy scientist or a bloody Marine talking, there."

Tori gave a soft laugh. "Please?"


	13. Twix'd And Torqued

**13: TWIX'D AND TORQUED **

**December 1, 2559**

They made good time getting out, and at the quarter-mile mark, the sound of the Brute base erupting met them. The sound was followed by a shuddering ripple that shook loose a lot of dust from high perches, giving the day a hazy appearance for a while. Flint could see through it readily, but the Marines with him needed to constantly wipe it out of their eyes, and the detail made the going thereafter somewhat slower.

Once most of said dust had settled or blown away in the wind – Edgley commented on how it felt moist and suggested rain – the going got easier. Thus far, nothing but bodies had turned up, though after crossing through a building to circumvent a collapse that had filled the street heading in the same direction, Flint came to a total stop to take in what lay beyond.

Six structures ten and twelve stories high had been leveled, and by the sunken faces of the surrounding standing structures, they had fallen explosively. Between and beneath the drifts of disarranged spears and planks of building siding and skeleton, the scattering of bodies was evident. A pair of legs stuck out from beneath what might have been solid false bricking, the scorched edges of the bricking telling how it had come loose. But those legs were human – had once been human.

Everyone present at the scene was unmistakably deceased, with only Flint and his three Marines as exception. Looking at the scene only wrinkled the Spartan-II's brow, and he turned away almost as soon as he'd come to it, unwilling to rummage for dogtags to see who was who. The Marines hesitated a while longer, taking it in, before ultimately following after him, one or two of them looking morose for lack of opportunity to ID the Marines they were leaving behind.

Doubtless nobody come before them had had opportunity to do so – this mess was fresh, the result of the bombardment of that morning. Much of the spilled blood was still the same color it had been when freshly spilt, rather than the decayed, crusty black that all blood transformed to after a while in open air.

Flint had just made it around the farthest reaches of the shelling when a row of tumbled building pieces caught his eye; one had squashed the Marine lying there between a couple of them, then rolled on after doing its dirty deed, but there was blood splashed across more than just that one fragment. Several of the nearer chunks looked well greased with human juice, said human quite possibly squeezed not unlike an orange. Standing erect between a plate of plexiglass window material and the sill where it had been mounted was one lonely dogtag… lying flat in the splatter of blood beneath it, was the bead chain it belonged on, with the other tag hanging on by a single bead at the end of the snapped chain.

Flint squatted, rifle across one knee, and picked up the one on the pavement first, lifting it to look at the serial number.

The data stamped onto the steel oval didn't really tell him much, but when he transferred it and the chain to his other fingers, plucked the second tag from the shattered sill, and looked at that, he felt that frown return as a block of ice landed in his guts.

It read; _O'Neil, Frank J_.

Immediately his gaze flicked up to the crushed Marine just ahead of where the dismantled dogtags had been, but away again before he could even identify if the man even still owned a face, let alone what features it might have once possessed. Straightening, Flint tucked the dogtags into that fist, clamped it around the MA in his other hand, and started walking.

The sooner he put distance between himself and that scene, the better. Maybe once he'd cooled his thoughts he could figure out what to do about it. At the moment, all he knew was how much he wanted to find Obivok and teach the bastard a thing or two about stealing from Flint.

Obivok would not, the Spartan-II promised silently, survive the lesson.

.

December 2, 2559

It was past midnight when the relay of news reached the inner warehouse where Frank had bunkered up. He and ten other Marines had clustered initially to try to bang heads enough to shake a plan out of their conglomeration, but ultimately the lot of them were a walking corpse. The division was toast, and there was no immediate sign of the Brutes' jamming signal quitting. The UNSC would never hear about it if they all up and died.

Not until much, much later, when perhaps their only remains were Brute poop and scattered bits of inedible parts. A front had blown through the area around eight the previous afternoon, however, and now everyone was cooped in tight bunches trying to keep warm. Their gear was enough to stave off shaking, but fingers, toes, and noses still suffered from the abrupt chill.

What Elites remained suddenly stood up and sprinted like horses for the exit, their clamor causing an alarmed stir in the Marines that could still rise. Most of the ones who chose to follow the aliens outside carried their rifles with them, at the ready, loaded and with one in the chamber. Frank could move, but he was much slower on the knee he was still uncertain of how he'd injured. By the time he made it to the rolling door of the warehouse's main truck entrance, and peered out, the looming green figure in Mjolnir had closed most of the gap, and the three Marines with him were trying desperately to keep up.

Frank smiled for three reasons; that the brother he'd worked so hard to find had made it back from his fools' errand alive, that the men would feel safer with their second Spartan restored to them, and that someone besides him could deal with the walking enigma that was the other one.

But when Flint got a dozen feet from the doorway, the Marines around them swarmed together for a moment before retreating out of the wind in the street with the Elites back into the building proper. The Spartan just froze where he was, standing there staring at Frank as if unsure of what he was looking at.

Frank gave his best puzzled look. "You alright?"

Wordlessly, Flint extended a closed hand, and dangling from it was the broken chain with the dogtags strung back onto it.

Frank looked at them, then back at the shadowed gold visor staring back at him, and held a hand out for them. That Flint had walked through the place where Frank's men had been caught and shelled half to death was evident; whose dogtags those were that he was holding was of some question, though. When Flint dropped the chain, its broken ends promptly squirreled off Frank's hand and tried to slither to the ground, but he caught it with his thumb and stopped it as he looked at the tags themselves.

He promptly adopted a very embarrassed, sheepish grin. "Oh."

"Don't," Flint instructed, sounding irritated, "_ever_ do that again."

Frank looked back up in time to see the Spartan walk into the building past him, as if that had been all he'd wanted to say. Shaking his head in bemusement – his manner had not changed a whit, despite everything implied over the course of knowing him – Frank just turned and followed, allowing the Marine standing behind him to close the rolling door, and shut the cold wind out again.

"Who's tags are they, sir?" The man asked, pausing Frank's limping pursuit.

He half-turned back, meeting the other man's gaze for long enough to answer; "Mine," and then he turned back again and continued forward.

.

December 2, 2559

"There are fewer Brutes than Marines in this city. Their Chieftain is just making a bold show of hands to keep us on our heels. I was able to walk into their rear base without seeing a soul."

The Lieutenant didn't look convinced. "The men we have left are in no condition to fight. Those that are are so few, I need them standing watch and guarding our perimeters. What are we supposed to do about that, exactly, that would do us any good? A Brute with one friend is just as tough to take down as a Brute with twenty."

"There's only one way to disarrange Jiralhanae." Vy'atree put in, giving a nod to Flint, who had spoken first.

"We need to take down their Chieftain – When Obivok is dead, the rest will abandon his commands and either flee outright, or start killing one another in a bid to take his place." The Spartan-II finished, not missing a beat. "Which would solve our current issues pretty much unanimously regardless of which one they choose."

"They wouldn't hunt us down first, to avenge their Chieftain?" The Lieutenant asked, skeptical.

"You are thinking much like a Human." Vy'atree accused, making Frank chuckle.

"You do it too, from time to time, splitlip," he said, earning a scowl from the Elite.

"Frank." Flint warned. To the Lieutenant, he continued, "Brutes aren't that farsighted. Or if they are, they don't care to display it. The truth is, their conditions aren't all that much better than ours at the moment, and if they were given the option to cut and run for it, they probably would. Even if they don't, their attention won't be on us for very long once the command chain crumbles and willing successors pile up faster than open positions do."

At the Lieutenant's puzzled expression, Vy'atree explained, "Jiralhanae determine their ranks by their prowess. Prowess must be proven, and so the only way to determine rank is to fight for it and win. Whom they fight is, of course, those who doubt their prowess or contest their right to said desired position. Which, as the noble Zelis' has explained, is best described as 'infighting'. It is, in fact, infighting in its simplest form."

"So where is this Chieftain and how do we get a strike team to him without having to go through what's left of his minions first?" The Lieutenant asked, adding quickly, "And what do I send with this strike team to make them effective? I'm sure all of you would agree that we can't afford to lose any more personnel. We've suffered enough losses here to call the number of dead a statistic. That's sad, people. We weren't even numerous enough to qualify for that term when everyone was _alive_."

"We have sixteen special-task force Elites, ten normals, and two Spartans." Frank put in. "At last head-count, I believe the number of combat-ready… er, combat-_capable_ Marines was nineteen. That's a total of forty-seven combat-capable personnel available for the strike team in question." He shrugged. "I don't know what to send with them, though… everything? I've never needed to surgically cut a Chieftain out of a horde of Brutes before, so I don't know what the mission entails."

"It will not be easy, even if the Chieftain is alone," Vy'atree put in. "That circumstance is unlikely, however. Chieftains usually keep a personal guard of at least six, sometimes as much as ten. This one may not. He is difficult to judge, considering his actions thus far. His behavior is strange, even for a Brute."

"What do we know about him besides his un-Brute-like battle behavior?" The Lieutenant asked, his gaze switching between the Spartan and the Elite. Frank was almost convinced the man was comparing the two by height or breadth or something. "Has anyone fought a Chieftain personally before?"

"I have." Flint answered, sounding distant. "This one… in fact."

Vy'atree turned his long head, looking squarely at the Spartan. Both Marines followed the Elite's gaze, waiting for that thought to be finished.

Flint looked back up at Vy'atree, then. "Do you recall a certain overgrown beast named 'Taramee?"

At the mention, Vy'atree's mandibles crooked. "The 'oaf'… you fought him on introduction. I do."

Flint shook his head. "Seriously, I do not recall ever calling him that… in front of _any_ of you."

"What about him, might I ask?" The Elite pressed, righting the topic from its meander.

"Obivok harvested Sangheilian civilians for fodder for his troops from the world where 'Taramee had kin, and I went with him when he hunted the Brute down for the crime. We fought, Obivok and I… but he got away before I could finish him. That is how he knows me, and why he wants me dead so badly." Flint explained. "He didn't take it very well."

"I'll say." Frank huffed. "Bastard thought I was you and started hammering my men trying to get at me… hasn't quit yet."

Flint cast him a look. "I hear that happens to a lot of the non-Humans, these parts."

Vy'atree huffed, his alien features wrinkling in what could have been either a frown or a pout, but the sentiment remained the same. He'd mistaken them, too, once.

"What will you need?" The Lieutenant asked, righting the topic yet again.

"Tori, Vy'atree, and three of his best able. Anything more than that and we'll be a walking billboard for all the other Brutes to look and shoot at as we go by."

"Are you sure about Tori?" Frank put in, suddenly, drawing the Lieutenant's gaze.

"What's wrong with her?" he asked.

Flint just nodded. "She's got some bad habits I plan to make be really useful on this op. So yes. I know she's been dragging… she hasn't been tested on endurance like this in a while, but she'll manage."

Frank frowned, retaining doubts about that being the reason for her repeated collapsing – he wasn't even convinced it was her immune booster breaking down doing it, either – but if anyone knew how to toss Tori, it would be Flint. While they didn't appear to really get along all that well, they did seem to operate well enough together under fire, so he let it slide. Maybe more would be explained later. "Fair enough. Let's gather the team up and get you run through the weaponry we have left… better prepared early regardless of departure time."

At that, the four dispersed, Vy'atree to collect the three Elites requested, Flint to find and rouse Tori, and the two Marines to collect enough gear to make the mission possible. Both were somewhat curious as to why no Marines were selected for the mission – it would make several of the men grumpy to know it – so as they went, Frank quietly roused a few of the men himself, and got them prepared to flank Flint's front team. It would strip the warehouse to a bare minimum of defenders, but if it came down to it, every last man living and awake would fight to the very bloody end if Brutes tried to invade the place. On the flip side, if they managed to bring Obivok down, having sparse defenders wouldn't matter overmuch since the remaining Brute occupancy would turn on itself thereafter.

Might as well try to reinforce the idea of treachery and chaos in the enemy ranks as much as possible while it still seemed a possible outcome, after all.

.

December 2, 2559

With the last of the immediate wounded seen to or beyond the point of care, Tori had managed to attract the attention of one of the medics. It was not by design or intent, however, but merely because it had been mentioned that she'd begun to drop in combat for seemingly no reason at all. She was sitting on the floor of the warehouse's second story with her helmet in her hands, cradled just above her crossed legs, with the medic in question standing facing her to her left when Flint walked up to them.

Tori looked up first, since he'd approached from behind the Marine, though when he wasn't trying to be stealthy, it was rather hard to miss a man in a half-ton of armor. Noting the expression on the Marine's face, Flint paused a few feet shy of finishing his approach. "Something I should know about?"

The medic opened her mouth; that was all she did, though, before Tori interrupted sharply with, "No." The tone of her prompt answer tipped an eyebrow on the medic, but nothing else was added.

Flint's own brows met. "…okay. If you're sure about that."

"What do you want?" Tori asked, tiredly, returning his frown.

"Need you to suit up and get downstairs. We're moving out in an hour and you'll need to pick up some equipment before you go." Flint answered, plainly.

Tori rolled her eyes. To the medic she muttered, "I don't even get _asked_… he just _tells_ me these things."

The medic just shrugged, nonchalantly. "That's command chains for you, ma'am. You're clear, I suppose – but if it happens again, I want to hear about it."

"If what happens again?" Flint asked, his frown turning perturbed. "What's going on?"

"Nothing." Tori snapped, pushing to her feet and tugging the helmet down over her head once straight. Marching stiffly past where Flint was standing, she knocked an elbow into his arm on her way past, adding, "Now let's move out."

Flint cast the Marine medic a quirked brow, but she only shook her head, re-packing her meager medical supplies. "Once I have something worth reporting, sir, I'll make a report. Until then, I have nothing to add."

Without a word more to the conversation, he just donned his own helmet, turned around and followed Tori out. She could be stubbornly difficult, but for the most part she remained combat effective. He just hoped she didn't decide to up the ante and include any friendlies – namely, himself – in the list of downrange targets.

The medic stood still for a while, watching the pair of Spartans depart, and when they both had descended the stair to the ground floor, she turned back to her cache of items and lifted a small, circular device from her pack. Into this went a narrow white acrylic tab, and into the other end of that, she placed the single droplet of blood. The device clicked when it activated, and chimed when it produced results on the digital screen.

The medic quirked a brow, then exhaled past a smirk. "Yeah… that'd do it."

.

December 2, 2559

Prepped and ready, the two Spartans took their four-Elite team out of the warehouse district heading directly south. The sun wasn't quite up yet, giving their exit a better chance of going undetected, but the twilight was a good deal better as far as concealing their visibility went. Soon enough it would be bright morning, though, and the shadows were getting shorter with each passing minute. Flint made sure the wearied Elites stayed nimble and quick, though Tori appeared – for now – to be spry and springy.

Flint had his doubts about her attitude, though, especially since despite being on her toes, she remained crabby and difficult. She carried her elbows down, her shoulders curled forward, her MA shouldered already even though the barrel was pointed at the ground, and she seemed to be counting off how many strides she was taking. If that meant she was high on something and trying to stay leveled, or even if all it was was a premature buzz of adrenaline, it wasn't really a good thing.

If, by some miraculous switch in fortunes she was merely taking posture lessons from the Marines, he could deal with that; but it was unlikely, especially if she was unanimously crabby to everyone, and not just him. Frank had expressed concern about taking her along on this op… perhaps that was why. Her behavior had probably tipped the seasoned Marine off to a great many flaws in her combat capability, though most of those Flint had already discovered and learned how to deal with.

Or… mostly, how to deal with. She wasn't acting tipped, and she wasn't babbling, so perhaps there remained a scant hope that she wasn't high on something the medic had given her. This did not alleviate any of the rest of the situation, however. Of the four Elites – remarkably enough, Vy'atree himself was not among them – two of them looked vaguely familiar and the other two seemed to defer to the first two's judgment about the human being in charge of the op. That part he could work with easily. Perhaps not all of Delta Halo had been a bust. It was certainly paying off here on Fargo.

Just to test and see if Tori was alert and focused, Flint pretended to spot movement to the side – the side away from Tori – and leveled his rifle at the chosen spot in reflexive gesture the same way he would have had he not been pretending.

Right on cue, every last one of the Elites braced, weapons up, in that direction, though one of them glanced around down the other streets, too. Tori appeared around his trailing elbow almost immediately, pacing a couple of strides ahead in the direction of the false alarm, her own MA aimed at it even as Flint's aim came down. "Clear," he said, allowing the Elites to relax.

Tori shot him a look. "Don't get flinchy on me, Flint." She chastised, turning away and resuming their former path.

Oh well… crabby, yes, but also focused. Flint just shook his head, and paced forward after her. Behind him, he heard one of the Elites mutter something that wasn't even a word in _Sangheilian_. The event made him frown at the back of Tori's helmet. Maybe he should be as crabby as she was being, and even the playing field a bit. If even the aliens were grousing about him, too, perhaps it really was something about Flint that was wrong!

Somehow, his small pretense to test Tori's presence of focus turned into an actual event that he found himself unprepared for. When a rain of hot spikes stitched across his shield from that side, their impact unbalanced him. The four Elites sprang away, returning fire even before Tori got turned around or Flint got his feet back under him. Time slowed down to a crawl, and the spike rounds and plasma bolts seemed to fly a little slower through the air between the approaching Brute patrol and Flint's strike team. Righting his balance with an outward bracing step and returning his momentum forward, Flint brought his MA up and aimed for the foremost Brute.

Muzzle flash from his right told him Tori had just opened fire, and by the way the Brute danced backwards from the punishing impact of rifle bullets, she had apparently aimed at the same target he had. That Brute went down in a splatter of what had once been the front of its chest, shields breaking almost too fast to have been real. Within moments, all four of the Brute's party – two Brutes and two Grunts – were down and spreading pools of blood on the crete. Looking back over his own troop, Flint saw one Elite down, but the alien just shook the stars out of his eyes, jerked the spike out of his side, and got back up.

Where a similar hit on a Marine would have broken several loops of intestine, the same on the Elite didn't seem to do more than make him flinch when he took a stride with the leg on that side. The wound didn't even weep much. Figuring if the Elite thought he could handle it, Flint wouldn't bother him about it. Turning back the other way, to see where Tori was standing, Flint took a moment to exchange the magazine in his rifle.

She caught his look, and promptly turned away again. "Keep moving." By her tone alone it was obvious she felt he'd returned her quip about being 'flinchy' from earlier, even though he hadn't said a word – and in truth, hadn't been thinking that, either.

"Tori." Flint summoned, drawing her up into a half-turn. For her hesitation, two of the Elites got out in front. Shaking his head, Flint added, "Don't want you on point."

She emitted what sounded like an indignant exhalation, but said nothing, falling back to just behind his left shoulder, and pacing there instead.

Flint just breathed a quiet sigh, and hoped the remainder of the mission ahead went with a measure fewer hiccups… and hopefully, his troop would not have revealed itself to be badly chosen before it was over.


	14. Little Known Truth

**14: LITTLE**-**KNOWN TRUTH**

December 2, 2559

It had taken a little under two hours to find their way through and into the 'Brute-controlled' part of town without being spotted. If Obivok knew what they were up to before they were ready for him to, the mission might be very badly spoiled. More Marines than Brutes or not, those were overall, rounded numbers. And no party of six was going to make any kind of dent in a population of remnant hundreds when it came right down to it, Spartans or no Spartans.

Embedded irreparably now, at the foot of the forward tower, Flint felt that at any moment, the shit was going to hit the fan and the action would start. The tower was comprised of four wing-shaped subsections, whose topmost floor housed a gravity lift that connected to the belly of the ship hovering overhead. That thing had appeared during the night, at some indiscernible point, given that it hadn't been in the skyline the day before. Despite all outward appearances, the place seemed to be deserted. He wasn't entirely assured of mission success, however; the wounded Elite was starting to squint one eye for long periods of time, as if using the expression as an alternative to a permanent grimace. On the other side, Tori looked like all her springiness was worn away and now she was just a step shy of actually dragging. She retained her gun in her arms, but that was about where the similarities between then and that morning ended.

Maybe she hadn't had enough breakfast, and was worn out just like all the Marines were. Her stamina was probably still all shot to hell from so many decades in a tiny little asteroid laboratory, despite almost a year's worth of constant calisthenics since then. Some people could bounce back from anything in no time at all… some people, however, were not all people, and apparently Tori was among that other crowd.

It sure hadn't taken long at all to get to that point, though. It wasn't reassuring at all. Still, getting through the first doors and past the first maze of corridors was about the same as it had been, the first time. Everything was empty, though at a glance it might have fooled a body. The gun emplacements remained, and even on good days, it was difficult to see the gunner in a Shade turret's seat when the business end was facing the observer.

Once inside, the Elites looked very lost; only the fact that Flint had been through the place once before kept any of them from becoming truly so. That time, however, they didn't get in nearly as far as the first time before resistance was met; and it was more than just a duo of Brutes. Six of the hairy ape-like aliens jumped to at the arrival of Elites, stirring up a nest of Jackals some ten or twelve deep. The Elites pressed their advantage of surprise, and opened fire with grenades into the back ranks immediately, blowing apart the ones that tried to dive for the door on the other side of the room.

Right away it became evident that none present were especially battle-ready; only one Jackal had an arm-shield, and he didn't get it active and up in time to do him any good. None present appeared to have their guns on them, either, though one Brute in the front took a chestful of plasma in exchange for disemboweling one of the Elites with a ten-inch dagger. Flint dragged the front-less beast back off his victim, shouldering the massive carcass aside to shoot past it even as it fell away into the midst of the remaining few. He'd never put Jackals down this easily before – always, always those abominable arm-shields had gotten in the way, forcing him to mind his target, exercising patience sometimes beyond what allotment he had to expend. Still in the back, mainly, and still straddling the threshold of the doorway into the room, Tori picked her shots between the mincing Elites. When the one went down and Flint struck out sideways past the fallen, she stepped neatly right up into the hole provided, and burned the last of her magazine into the last screaming Jackal. Once the room was empty and quiet, the strike team exchanged glances before Tori saw Flint look back and down at their fallen member.

The Elite was holding back any commentary he might have had about his condition, but when he looked back up at Flint, it seemed clear he understood his fate. Taking a breath to clear his throat first, he proceeded to offer a sentence in that alien dialect Tori didn't understand. When he pointed his plasma rifle at her, she backed up a step on reflex, but the reaction only made the other three Elites growl at her as if in disapproval.

"He wants you to take it, Tori." Flint supplied, in English. "If you don't take it, you'll dishonor him."

"Oh." She reclaimed her lost stride, and lifted the weapon from the dying warrior's hands, feeling mixed; since when did anyone _offer_ a weapon by _aiming_ it at someone? Once she had it, though, the remaining compliment of Elites seemed to settle their irritation somewhat, and one of them even turned his attention elsewhere as the nearest accepted the last two grenades off his fallen companion's belt.

When Flint headed for the door at the other end of the room, Tori followed him, suddenly feeling very much apart from the crowd; he was practically the only one present anymore that would understand what she meant if she did something, or said something… and worse still, she couldn't begin to fathom what the barks and gurgles the Elites emitted as a language translated into, so it left a rather broad communication gap that only Flint could fill.

Barely had her boot struck the corridor beyond the door than a final round from a Carbine echoed after her, causing her to turn. She didn't get all the way around, though, when a hand on her elbow jerked her back front again. Finding herself facing Flint's visor – looking at her from over one shoulder – she suppressed a hiccup. "Did… they just do what I think they just did?" she asked, timid.

"Yes." He released her elbow, and returned that hand to his rifle. "Don't interfere."

Tori felt her face wither up into a pained, confused expression she knew he couldn't see, but she nodded once. "Okay." Deciding not to look back at what really wasn't a nice picture anyway – dead Brutes and Jackals all about, plus that one Elite – Tori just moved forward after Flint when he turned away and resumed their advance.

It was going to be one of those days, she just knew…

.

December 2, 2559

Morning mists had burned off, and the troops were milling wearily, too tired to do much beyond drive their Ghosts and sit in their Wraiths. Obivok had not driven his clan this hard ever before, but each understood the merits for why; never before had such a demonic being as the legendary 'Zelisee crossed the path of a Jiralhanae clan. That he had risen to challenge Obivok first was just a technicality. Obivok – and all of the Black Paw, for that matter – needed to defeat him at all costs, lest they fall into the mists of time without heir like that sun-burnt morning mist. Gone, in about an hour.

Not a pretty prospect, for any clan, of any standing or strength. Greater clans had fallen to similar challenges, though mainly that was a failing on the part of the Chieftain being arrogant, a foolish, soft-skinned idiot, or similar. Obivok felt sure he was not such a Chieftain, and he kept his personal entourage close at hand every moment he spent on the blasted planet's surface.

He'd begun to spend his resting times on his cruiser, having no especial wont to be slain in his sleep, by 'Zelisee or any of his minions. Today, he was almost worn to the point of recalling his clan and simply burning the planet from orbit. But ultimately, such a brash action would not elicit much, when a few score of the Human and Sangheili minions perished while 'Zelisee simply followed him up into the skies in that infernal sensor-dark dart he had.

Obivok did not enjoy the thought of being hunted down through the long corridors of his own cruiser. Surely the gods did not dictate such a fate for him and his clan! Before 'Zelisee had come for him, many things had been going quite well. The Black Paw was prosperous and numerous, and Obivok had secured a place a little higher up in the clans ordering than his predecessor had, elevating all of the Black Paw just that much more in the hierarchy of Jiralhanae clans.

In a way, 'Zelisee had ruined everything for Obivok. Everything. Rights to good equipment for his clan, rights to bountiful foodstuffs, rights to desirable females… everything. And the blasted demon-thing hadn't even had the decency to be doing it for any kind of good reason… or even a bad reason! He just seemed to be _doing_ it, for no reason whatsoever.

Today Obivok was overseeing reordering and redeployment of the forward clan members and what meager old-Covenant minions they had with them. Most of his Unggoy had been expended already, despite how the little scum could out-breed any insect one could name. Standing planet-side in the center of the once-Human city, somewhat safe within his own clan's hand-built base, Obivok still remained just sprinting distance from the gravity platform that would rise into the belly of the cruiser and far, far from anywhere where 'Zelisee could grapple with him.

As much as he spoke highly of his own prowess, and as much as he instilled in his clan that the demon was his and his alone to take on and take down, Obivok was secretly hoping to never see the demon, to never need to fight with it. And the readily available escape route was a mechanism to ford just such events into his favor.

Let some of the clan perish, if they must. Obivok would not allow his clan as a whole, least of all himself, to be wiped off the face of the galaxy just for the whimsy of one hell-spawned demon that two of the be-blasted races he fought against claimed was one of their own.

Let them! He wanted nothing of the demon, and surely would be happier to know it if he never saw it ever again. And so, with these contemplations on his forebrain, it came as some small surprise when he looked up at the opening of the southern door and saw none other than the demon 'Zelis himself, come for a reckoning.

He did not enter alone, nor did he do so quietly, both of which were somewhat new for the demon. At his flank was another, smaller demon of comparable height but insufficient breadth and mass. This hell-spawn seemed to revel in the demise of those who rallied against the invasion as much as 'Zelisee always had. At the flank of the two, a trio of cursed Sangheili stood and fought, like pets on a leash, heel to the bark of the demon at their fore.

As the fray exploded before him, Obivok calmly lifted his hammer from where he'd propped it against the console he stood over, and turned around to walk away, through his personal guard and then leading them, straight for that gravity lift.

It was time, it seemed, to go.

Abruptly, the fighting broke in two, and the tone changed; when Obivok half-turned to see, the skinnier demon was charging straight at him, half-leaping to knock an intercepting Brute aside with a momentum-infused elbow strike to the head. Right behind it came two of the Elites, both with swords alight and twirling, minding the leading demon-thing's flanks as it ran straight for Obivok. The other, 'Zelisee, seemed preoccupied at the moment with handling the clan members blocking his view of their Chieftain.

He probably didn't realize what was about to become of his little brother-demon. Obivok braced, gripping his hammer in both hands, and waited as his personal guard spread out before him, taking their own defensive positions. There was really no sense taking the fight to the demon aimed at them, nor was there in preemptive shooting. Clan members remained between their positions, and would until the last minute as more gathered at the point of connection, trying to stave off the attack.

Such glorious souls he did command, such glory the Black Paw did own! It made Obivok's broad chest swell with pride to watch, even though he was watching them be either cast aside unhurt like mildly bothersome insects – an insult, of course – or butchered outright. But, it seemed, the demons of all hells didn't care what or why or who, they just seemed to be unanimously sent to destroy Obivok.

Well, he would meet their challenge, and with all the glory of the Black Paw behind him! Elbowing the nearest of his personal guard aside in his forward leap, Obivok lifted his hammer to meet in perfect timing with the approaching demon. Instead of such a meeting, however, and instead of crushing the demon – rather as expected, though, because it had never been so easy as that – the demon became elsewhere very suddenly, and hooked the butt of its Human-make rifle right into Obivok's ear, over the top of his extended arms.

Retracting said arms in an outward flail to cut off that stabbing attack that made his whole head ring painfully, Obivok scored a hit that sent the demon back, knocking down one of his own personal guard in the process when the two collided. Shielding flared brightly on both, and the demon sprang back, twisting, coiling, seeming to glide right up into the air like a snake twining through water. Obivok got his hammer between him and the demon again, resetting its approach, but again only temporarily. That time he minded his elbows, and blocked the circuit attack that proved to be over the other arm that time. Dropping the leading point of his hammer for a moment, he reached out to grab the demon's head in that hand.

It was his good hand, the one that was still flesh, the one he trusted to work correctly and do exactly as he commanded of it. This detail proved his undoing, ultimately, when in reply to having its head gripped, the sharp little barrel on the end of that Human-make gun it held stabbed through the meat of his wrist and bullets chewed out the backside of his arm for his trouble. Obivok released the demon with a roar of pain, tugging his hammer around to knock the demon away – or force it to depart on its own, as it seemed to – and reverted to his original vector.

Run, and the demons be damned! 'Zelisee might have renown, but it seemed all demons were just as bad as he! He felt the hammer connect with something, but he was already turned away, and the weapon trailed after him as he charged headlong for the door that would open straight onto the gravity lift; a platform that rose and fell with command, rather than an open beam that could admit a steady stream of users.

He did not want bullets to fill the soles of his feet, in case of just this very circumstance, and that was why he had chosen to drop the platform itself instead of merely a lifting beam. Once he was on it, and it was up, he would be safe from the rigors of combat, and no one could follow him into the cruiser without wings. And if the demons were on foot, that meant they didn't have wings readily available.

Or, he hoped not, anyway.

.

December 2, 2559

Tori had gotten out ahead of the main press, but there was little going to slow a Spartan-II who had momentum. Blasting a path through the thickest of them had slowed him just a little, but ultimately Flint got out the other side in time to see Tori duck the Chieftain's parting blow, and it landed squarely in the chest of the Elite on her elbow.

That Elite was killed instantly, crumpling lifeless to the floor some dozen feet away. Flint just leapt over the tumbling body, unwilling to pause long enough to even look back at it. The one Elite still with him when the other two had gone chasing after Tori had already been dragged down and pulled apart, so he had nothing but what was ahead to worry about.

For the moment, what remained of his strike team seemed to be holding their own, aside from that one unlucky swipe that had killed the Elite he'd just jumped over. He didn't reach Tori's position before she was back out of her ducking crouch, though, and off running headlong after the retreating back of Obivok and his small entourage. What had possessed her to take him on by herself, he didn't know – and would probably ask of her, later, if the Brute didn't kill her first. In the meantime, though, he was just a handful of strides behind her, the last of their Elites fallen behind and left to mince the Chieftain's minions with his sword all by himself.

Flint felt bad for abandoning him, but he knew for a fact if he let Tori take Obivok alone, she'd only die for her trouble. The Elite at least knew his trade, knew what he was doing, and hadn't spent the last thirty or forty years of his life cooped in isolation doing mental math while his capability as a soldier withered away into nothing.

Tori had not completely forgotten her youth in the Orion Project, but a three-decade old memory was no comparison to actual combat experience, in the field, and to say she had become rusty would have been an understatement. She'd had a career change, is what, and at the moment that little detail was more than likely going to get her smeared.

Surely she had to _know_ that.

But straight ahead she charged, and she looked ready to take on the world if it challenged her. She would probably give a good fight once everyone was caught up, but that in no way increased her odds of surviving, or even winning. Worse, Flint realized as he passed the doorway onto the enormous circular chamber set with a gravity plate, she was _faster_ than him, and she was going to meet without him whether he liked it or not.

Even as he put on as much running speed as he owned, she still pulled out ahead of him, and the door they shot through probably didn't even register their passage before they were to it and through and gone again. Doubtless had it been shut, Tori would have just punched a ragged hole through the barrier and kept right on going. Once on the lift plate, though, the small collection of Brutes turned, bunched up together, and braced to meet their challengers.

Flint felt the lift begin to move, and knew it was rising. Wherever they were going, it probably held more Brutes, and if Obivok was still alive at that point, it would likely be the end of the fight for all involved.

Even Flint couldn't take on quite that many enemy at once and come out of it in one piece. He'd proven that when he'd followed G'wi to the shipyard on the world where he'd crashed his Longsword and met the surly old Elite for the first time. Tori met the braced Brutes with all the momentum she'd carried through that door, and like bowling pins they all scattered out, tumbling, rolling, some going so far as to flip over their own heads across the floor of the lift platform.

Flint struck second, catching that hammer with both hands and jerking it straight out of the Chieftain's hands on his way past. The partial swing it had been employed in was thwarted completely as Obivok's entire body was strung out sharply to one side after the retreating Spartan, the crack of knuckles following Flint's passage. The hammer was flung away, to the edge of the lift and off, tumbling freely.

Coming to a halt on both hands and a knee, Flint turned about to see what he had to work with. Tori was already up and out of the tangle, but Obivok had retreated to allow his personal guard to handle her. Flint warred between taking him down while he had no ready allies to help him out, and saving Tori's ass, before ultimately deciding it was probably best to pick off the assistance first anyway.

Catching the first one in line, Flint cupped its muzzle in one hand and punched the back of its thick neck with his other fist, and without withdrawing the strike first, jerked the Brute's muzzle about, partly up and partly sideways, so the stressed neck snapped right apart. Riding the alien down to the lift floor on a boot to its back, Flint caught the next one right as Tori grappled with the one beside it, and all four went down in a tangle of limbs.

Just when Flint thought he could save the situation from any terrible ending, the Brute he'd grabbed got both arms between them, and threw him off. He came off right into Obivok's waiting arms, and was immediately caught around the neck by one paw while the other pummeled his visor like there was no tomorrow. Flint managed to catch the punching arm, and sank his fingers right through the wrist like there was a hole through it already… something he did not expect to have happen. But like G'wi's claws in his fresh shoulder wound back in the day, his exo-plated fingers curled tightly through Obivok's wrist brought the beast down, howling, and for just a moment, his grasp around Flint's neck loosened.

Immediately he tore free, and flinging the wounded hand away, struck the Chieftain in the face with his other fist. It was righthanded, but the blow proved enough to unbalance the Brute and send him back on his heels. A quick check on what Tori was up to derailed any followup intentions; true to prediction, the other Brutes had teamed up and brought her down, and despite her kicking and flailing in protest, they seemed to possess the upper hand.

One caught her by an arm, dragged her up, and curled the other elbow around her helmet and dropped a hairy foot onto her hips. Tori latched onto the arm around her head with both hands before the Brute twisted viciously sideways.

"Tori!" Flint exclaimed, certain that that had just killed her; he caught the first Brute in the way and stabbed a fist into its metal chest plate, denting the thing badly and folding under the alien's solar plexus. As the Brute went down wheezing loudly, Obivok caught Flint from behind again, and in one savage motion, lifted the Spartan over his head and threw him bodily for the edge of the rising lift.

He struck far shy of that edge, but tumbled quickly towards it, arms out and fingers clawing at the hopelessly smooth surface of the lift's top. For a moment, he thought he might have stalled out enough, and then he found himself in freefall. Once down, there was no way back up, no way to reclaim Tori, no way to catch Obivok, no way to stop the Brutes from getting away again.

Something inside of him reared up in savage protest, snarling unlike any other expression of rage he'd ever known. Something he didn't even know had been in there. Something new… something with no name, but with extreme governance over every piece of him.

The fact that he'd been flipped off the edge of the rising dias entirely rewrote itself in his brain, and he struck the wall with a boot and extended back out to it in a leap without consideration to if the action had consequences.

He caught the lip of the platform with both hands, kicked the underside with both boots and used the rebound to hurl himself bodily backwards over the edge onto the top. He tucked into a momentum-inspired roll, once over his own head, and used the final vestiges of it to bring himself to his feet once there. He braced forward immediately and charged in, leaping the last stride and bringing down a Mjolnir-clad fist in an arc across the side of the first turning Brute's face. Bone splintered and skin split, the dark blood of the alien squirting out through a massive rupture in his cheek even as his entire body twisted under the impact of that one, single hit, and forced him into a sideways bow. Flint recoiled from the follow up and brought his other fist around from below in an uppercut that knocked the Brute's jawbone in half, and embedded his bottom teeth into his top teeth. Like the first blow, the alien's entire upper body twisted away from the impact, this time turning out so far that he toppled straightaway over backwards, arms flailing out.

Flint didn't let him hit the floor. Catching him by a fistful of skin over his collarbones, the Spartan-II dragged the unbalanced Brute back again for a third strike. As the knuckles of Flint's leading fist dug deeply into the Brute's rising head, the alien's tongue squeezed out of his ruined mouth and a huffed grunt escaped. His head snapped back with enough force to shatter every vertebra in his neck and split his skull apart at every flexing seam.

Releasing the alien body as if it were little more than an animal, Flint watched him fall, sprawling loosely in death across the floor at his feet.

The entire exchange had taken less than a second to elapse.

He raised his ice-gray eyes and met the stare of the watching Brute Chieftain, and both knew at once that the following fight would not be short, nor pretty, and there would need to be some gods-inspired miracle before Obivok could ever escape this time. The clan-Chieftain had made a mistake, and now before him stood the price to be paid for it.

As if the moment had lapsed, and time resumed its flow, everyone moved at once. Instantly the remaining three Brutes attending their Chieftain's flank charged in, their simultaneous charge bringing each into assault range of the Spartan's responding charge at equal intervals. The first he struck in the throat, hard enough to knock it completely backwards off its momentum. When it hit the floor on its back, it clawed at its throat, mouth agape, without making a sound as it slowly suffocated to death.

The second was caught on the reaching swipe of its leading arm, turned downward and extended out of balance, and when it had bowed over, Flint brought his other elbow down across the back of its head, breaking its skull against the blunt point of the elbow of his Mjolnir. Lifting that same arm out of that motion, he curled that hand into a fist, and swiped it outward across the muzzle of the last one, twisting it out and away. As it twisted outward, Flint brought his other hand up, releasing the dead weight he'd been holding, and socked the turned Brute in the back of its turned head, snapping the skull off the spine as the blunt force turned its head farther than it could anatomically withstand.

With the last of the guard lain out in fatal repose, Flint charged straight for Obivok. At first the big Chieftain backpedaled, but ultimately there was no escaping the angry Spartan when the lift was only forty feet across, and it hadn't even gotten out of the top of the base structure yet, let alone even halfway into the sky toward the ship it was attached to. Flint struck, and for momentum alone, the two toppled to the surface of the lift platform.

Obivok roared, punching upwards at the demon that assailed him, kicking to get it off of him, but Flint had a hold of his bandoliers where they crossed, and he wasn't going anywhere. He accepted the first hit completely, in exchange for a grip on the open jaw on the bottom of Obivok's face. Twisting, clawing at the armored fingers across his teeth holding his mouth open, the Chieftain first tore Flint's hand away, then punted him off completely. Aware he didn't have time to mess around, Obivok rolled immediately away and sought his feet, but Flint hadn't gone as far as he'd liked.

Back again, Flint first landed a kick in the rising Chieftain's belly so hard that it flipped the oversized Brute fully over onto his back, and he landed with a strained huff. Catching the following arm by the hand on the end, Flint seated a boot against Obivok's head and pulled, twisting the arm around backwards as he did so. Obivok howled, kicking and thrashing, pawing at the boot against his face with his free hand.

Finally gathering his wits, the Chieftain twisted forward, freely rolling his caught shoulder to accommodate the motion, and came free of Flint's punishing hold. He got to his knees and turned to face where the Spartan had been, though, only in time to catch an accelerated fist straight to the face, where it shattered his cheekbone and most of the upper part of his muzzle as well.

Obivok's head slung out away from the impact, his jaw slacking open in renewed howl, but Flint wasn't finished yet. When he blindly swiped to give himself time to recover, all it did was make the Spartan grab that hand again, and this time he kicked the elbow, breaking it so it flexed the wrong way with an explosive snap. Gasping in inexpressable pain, Obivok caught his broken arm and lolled bodily away from the point of assault, still unable to focus on the picture in front of him. Another hit shattered that ear and sent fractured cracks around the back of his head, his skin splitting in grotesque display of what lay underneath it. But before the Chieftain could even topple, Flint had drawn the combat knife he'd never used until then, and with a last attendant motion on behalf of an old enemy, Obivok's throat gaped open with a gout of hot blood.

When no blood could get to his damaged brains anymore, the battered Chieftain simply sagged to the lift platform surface, and with a final gurgled huff, expired.

Flint stood still for a long moment, knife still clenched tightly in one hand, standing over the fallen Brute Chieftain, watching as the arterial blood ran across the gently domed surface of the lift platform and dribbled off the edge. Spherical droplets of blood floated upward around the edge where it was escaping, but out past a certain point those rising globules began to fall once again downward, to doubtless splash color across the lift platform floor.

Exhaling at last, Flint tossed the knife at Obivok's cooling body, and let it clatter to the lift under a furry elbow before he turned away, stepping over the collection of spilled Brute bodies to where Tori still lay. There, he knelt, and shoveled the Brute half across her away, before lifting her torso and propping it on his thighs.

He had often wondered what it would be like to be rid of her, annoying, infuriating, irritating as she was. All her flaws, all her frustratingly bad habits, all the strange, indescribably odd things she did… gone, with the rest of her. Now she was, though, Flint just wanted her back. Wanted to fuss at her for sloppy aim, wanted to hear her grouse about something he did, wanted to watch as she would chase the cat – whatever her name was – through the engine room because there was coolant fluid in her fur and she needed to be bathed before it poisoned her.

Wanted to hear her say something stupid.

As the lift finally completed its ascent to the cruiser above it and clamped down, Flint pushed his helmet off his head, and set it aside, the knot between his bright blond brows the only expression of what he was thinking… of what he was feeling.

For a moment, there was no one else, no Brutes or other creatures waiting for the lift to come up, to see who was on it, and Flint was all alone. Lifting the catches around Tori's helmet seal, he pulled her helmet off for her, letting it knock gently against his as the lift settled and stabilized, synching to the ship it had been built for.

With her head tucked into his armored elbow, she almost looked asleep, though the odds of her condition being so benign were abysmal. Even if she had, as some did, survived having her head disconnected from her spine, she wouldn't live for long in that state.

Softly, he called, "Tori."

Slowly, as if with much effort, she opened her eyes, focusing first on the insignia stenciled across his chest before looking up at his face.

"I'm sorry."

She inhaled softly, blinked once, and tasted her upper lip.

"Whatever I did… that made you mad," Flint explained, "I'm sorry."

Tori gave a soft smile, though appreciative or amused – or both – was to be seen. "Flint…" She rolled one shoulder, as if testing, then pulled that arm up across her chest, to spread that hand across the front of his armored chest.

"Yeah."

"I forgive you."

He covered her hand with his, the knot between his eyebrows loosening a little. "So does this mean you're not mad at me anymore?"

Tori's smile broadened. "Yeah. And… Flint…"

"Yes?"

"I'm pregnant."


	15. An AAR Worth Writing

15: AN AAR WORTH WRITINGDecember 2, 2559

The ship remained primarily unexplored; but he'd kicked the beaten body of the once-proud Chieftain off the lift so anyone who came down the corridors would see it. Setting the lift to take them back down again had been simple enough. The damn thing only had three buttons, and one was to activate the lock-and-seal for flying away into vacuum.

Down at the bottom again, Tori managed to pull herself back to her feet, and helmet in hand, tottered wobbily toward the door out. To hear her tell it, she'd had her neck "straightened" by that twisting maneuver she'd endured, and nothing more. Flint still kept an eye on her, uncertain if he should believe it or not.

He made sure to take point through that door, though, aware what crowd they'd left behind upon departing to join Obivok on the elevator. But through the door, all he saw were drifts of dead Brutes, a handful of dead something-elses, and standing there in a line all looking back at him were ten Marines and that one luckier-than-all-hell Elite he'd abandoned a while back.

Lowering his rifle from having aimed it at them, Flint just looked at them, wondering whose idea it had been to send a backup team and not tell him. Behind him, Tori caught up to his position, and promptly dropped an elbow on his shoulder, leaning heavily on it enough to make him shift his stance to withstand it. She still had her helmet in one hand, though, rather than having restored it to her head like he had, and her amused smile was evident to all watching as she took in the scene.

"Late to the party, guys." She accused.

"We came as fast as we could." Said someone behind the Elite, stepping over a sprawled Brute carcass to come into view. It was Frank. He'd been at rest long enough for his rifle to be secured to his back, instead of still in his hands. "Hey, Flint."

"Frank," was all Flint said.

He shot a brief glance at Tori, then at her helmet dangling from one hand, then quirked an inquisitive brow at his twin. "Get what you came for…?"

For just a moment, it seemed as if he might not answer… but instead, after a pause, he did in fact answer. "Yes sir."

His choice of words – words he hadn't spoken in as long as she'd known him – turned Tori's head and wrinkled her expression.

"Satisfied, 'Zelisee, now that you have stolen that honor all for yourself?" The Elite commented, earning a glance from Frank.

Flint gave a small nod. "Sure, what the hell. He was as much a pain in my ass as any of yours."

"Made nice with the grinch, too, I see." Frank mentioned, crossing his arms.

"Like everything else involving Tori, Frank," Flint responded, sounding half amused and half perturbed, "she did it to herself."

"Oh, I wouldn't say _everything_ involving me…" Tori mentioned, earning a glance from her fellow Spartan-II. Even through the polarized visor, it was obvious what his expression was. She just giggled.

"Let's get out of here," Frank decided, turning to wave a few hand-signals at the gathered Marines. "We can share AAR's later."

Shaking his head, Flint mumbled under his breath, "Haven't written one in years… don't plan to start now."


	16. Epilogue: Homecoming

EPILOGUE: Homecoming

**April 12, 2560**

Marine Master Sergeant Frank James O'Neil stepped into the kitchen, his officer's cap in both hands before him. He'd sent word ahead of his arrival, but the gods only knew if it had arrived, or even if they had read it yet. Deirdre stood to the left, nearer the sink, Jules to the right, both of the elderly couple facing slightly away. Mother and Father turned in tandem to see him, though all greeting words failed them when they saw the seriousness of the expression on their son's grizzled, scarred face. It had been nearly five years since he'd last seen them, and more than a year since either party had heard from the other. Frank was surprised to know they were still living, still in relatively good health, and pleased to know both. It would make what he was about to attempt a little easier.

"Dad." Frank began, slowly at first. His eyes stitched from one parent to the other. "Mom."

"Frank… it's good to see you." His father began, though the remainder of his thought wound up being spoken first by his wife instead.

"Is… something wrong, Frank?" She asked, tentative.

His gaze dropped for a moment to the tile floor, and he ran his eyes over the patterns scrawled into them before looking back up again. "I… ah, damn it all, even after all these years, I still don't know what I'm gonna say." Meeting their gazes again at last, he squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and said, "Mom, Dad… there's someone I want you to meet. Someone… you… ah…" he bit his bottom lip for a moment, then finished with, "Before I bring him in, promise me something."

His parents exchanged a puzzled glance. "What do you need, son?" His father asked.

"Whatever you do…" Frank focused on him, as if intending his requirement foremost for his father, "don't freak out. He's come a long way, been through a lot. I don't know how he's going to take this any more than I know how you two will. So please… just… don't… don't panic, okay?"

Deirdre inhaled audibly, but her query came out slightly muted; "Is it one of those lizard-aliens that have been on the news?"

One corner of Frank's mouth quirked up as he looked at her. "No, mom. He's human… he's… he's one of ours." The other corner quirked up to meet the first, then. "Ours, in more ways than one."

"Well," Jules took a deep breath, and hooked an arm around his wife's shoulders, "go ahead and bring him in, Frank, whoever this person is. I can't guarantee anything, but I think we'll do our best to remain civil, regardless of who," he glanced at his wife, then, "or what, he is."

Frank gave a slight nod. "Okay. I'm… I'll go get him now. You two wait here, okay?" Seeing both give their own agreeing nods in turn, he turned around and walked back through the door into the hall that met the front door. He'd left it hanging open, coming in, and through it he could see the jeep that had brought him here. Neither of the other two occupants were anylonger in it, but that was no real surprise.

Stopping in the yard, Frank looked around quickly to determine where the duo had gone. Spying them in the yard to the left of the door, he spared a moment to smile at the scene; Tori was crouched at the hem of one of the flower beds, a hand extended, a fuzzy worm doodling across her pointing finger. The goofy grin on her face was evidence of her utter lack of a proper childhood. Standing behind and to the side of her, Flint seemed to loom over her, half-bent and peering curiously at the worm as it made its way across her hand and made a turn to follow her thumb out to its end. Neither missed his presence for long, if it had taken them any time to note him in the first place, and when they looked directly at him, he waved them over with a simple hand-gesture.

This moment had waited for half a century. Frank wasn't going to allow it to wait anymore. They were men, some might say old men, and most men their age didn't get opportunities like this.

Frank watched as Tori let the worm crawl down off her thumb and back onto his mother's flowers – she probably didn't realize how annoyed his mother would be to know she'd done that – and then as the two Spartans walked toward the porch to close the gap. The thing was sturdy, and didn't groan under their weight, not even when both had ascended the steps to the raised wooden surface. Frank was silently grateful. Perhaps a small piece of paranoia about owning a six-foot frame himself had made their father buy a house capable of withstanding the presence of large people.

The pair looked very formal and dapper indeed in their black military dress uniforms, but the Spartan project had been an extension of ONI's section three, and the field-operative marks and pips for each looked nothing at all like the UNSC's own military arm's formal dress. Frank wore a dark navy blue, with altogether different marks and pips to address his own military career. Hopefully this reunion wouldn't go badly.

Flint could be twitchy about some of the oddest things…

Frank turned around again, and stepped back through the door. He proceeded down the entrance hall, past the guest bedroom on the right and the living room on the left, into the kitchen where his parents still stood, their backs to the counter lining the far wall. He stepped through the kitchen door, met each of their gazes once, then stepped to the side, out of the way.

He watched their expressions change as Flint stepped through the door, ducking slightly to pass without knocking his head against the upper frame but straightening easily once inside the kitchen proper. Deirdre's mouth slacked open first, followed shortly after by a slightly less-open expression on Jules. Finally, Deirdre looked back over at where Frank stood, glancing entirely past Tori, who filled the doorway she stood just inside of like a giant onyx block. Flint had stepped slightly to the side to permit her entrance behind him, but the look on the Spartan's face seemed pensive, puzzled, as if he was trying to place the faces of the man and woman in the kitchen in memory somewhere.

"F… rank?" Their mother asked, her normally strong voice sounding weak indeed.

"Wh… who is… who are you?" Jules asked, still looking at Flint.

"Mom… Dad… this is my twin brother, Flint Jordan O'Neil." Frank answered, a slight twinge of pride in his voice as he made the introduction. "I told you he wasn't dead – I told you that that boy was not him. I finally found him, Mom, Dad. I found him, and I brought him back home again, to prove it to you – to prove what I have been saying all along."

Both parents focused back on the Spartan, who was now looking at Frank with an expression somewhere between surprise and confusion. When he looked back at the elderly couple, though, he raised his eyebrows in tentative gesture at some other expression. Finally, for the very first time in forty-four years, Flint spoke to his parents; "I'm… told you think I died a rather horrible death, as a boy."

Frank grimaced; tact aside, that was quite possibly the worst conversation opener _ever_, in all the long history of bad conversation starters.

"How… how can it be Flint?" Jules stammered, breathless. Deirdre didn't seem to own a voice at all anymore, both hands clenched tightly to Jules'. "How can you be my Flint?"

Flint's hardened soldier exterior sagged somewhat as he groped for some way to answer that. The best he could come up with, sadly, was, "It's… classified."

"If you are… how? You were _sick_." Jules began, trying to figure out the puzzle more by identifying the pieces than by any attempt to assemble them. "You lost your legs, you were confined to a bed for better than a month, and all of your bones dissolved into gritty mush and the… th… how could you come back from that? How could anyone bring you back from that, regardless what you did after the fact?"

Flint's face wrinkled in concentration, much the same way Frank's would, under similar circumstances. "I was never sick. I… left… before then. Your… uh… he was a flash-clone, engineered with a disease written into his genetic coding so he would… so he wouldn't last long."

Jules' gaze stitched between the twins' faces for a full ten seconds before he focused again on Flint, and stayed there. Finally, his own voice faint, he asked, "Why did you leave? You were just a small boy… you were… you… were only six years old."

Flint nodded. "I know. The details are classified, however. I'm afraid I can't really explain much."

Deirdre suddenly came back vocally, her white-knuckled grasp on her husband's hands cinching all the tighter; "Were you injured terribly much, out there? We always saw Frank going down for what seemed no reason at all, and we… we didn't realize… we thought that…"

"I was… in training, until I was fifteen." Flint answered, sounding somewhat hesitant. "After that, I went on UNSC-sanctioned critical mission deployments, at first against insurrectionist operations, and later against Covenant actions."

She seemed to stare at him as if trying to blow holes through him using just her eyes. "Were you alone?" For a moment, it looked like she might actually let go of Jules, her denial at what stood before her starting to melt somewhat.

To that, Flint seemed to answer readily enough; he shook his head. "No. There were many others. Most of them were orphans, with nowhere left to go. I don't… really know why some of us were not." Frank tried not to grimace at the lie; Flint knew damn well why some of the Spartan-II's had been stolen away from their living parents. ONI had been looking for viable, capable genetic material, and just because the parents were still alive was no reason to stay their greedy hands. But they should have known better than to try to steal _one_ twin. Still, some things were better left unsaid, when it came to trying to explain Flint's long absence from the family.

For the first time, some attention was paid to Tori. Jules asked first; "And who is this?"

Flint looked over at her, but Frank answered first; with an impish grin, he introduced her as "Flint's girlfriend."

This made Flint frown meaningfully at him simultaneously with their parent's amused half-smiles, timid yet but still present. Deirdre asked, "What's her name? Does she have a name?" To Tori directly, she asked, "What's your name, honey?"

Tori cocked a dark eyebrow at the denotation, answering, "Tori one-three-eight."

Her answer, however willing or prompt, stuck a rather ungainly wrench into both of the O'Neil parents' expressions. Both looked at Frank. "What does she mean by that, Frank?" Deirdre asked.

"Um…" Frank began, his blond brows meeting.

"Spartans do not have last names." Flint put in, looking at his brother. "None of us did."

"Did you have a number, Flint?" Jules asked, looking back at the towering soldier.

He nodded. "Zero-five-seven. It was more often used than our names were."

"Tori…" Tori began again, looking over at Flint, and catching his attention with the repetition of her own name, "…Tori Margaret Alynn McIntosh."

END


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